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Aspic Jelly

Aspic jelly is a gelatinous dish made from boiled feet, beetroots, herbs, stock, eggs, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Beetroot and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 184 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Aspic Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stock

  1. Boil the neat's foot until tender.

  2. Clean the neat's foot.

Make the aspic

  1. Add beetroots, sweet herbs, parsley, onions, and second stock.

  2. Incorporate eggs.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, sugar, tarragon vinegar, and common vinegar. Boil the mixture.

  4. Strain the mixture through a jelly bag.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Beetroot + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together184 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Beetroot + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together745 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pepper + tarragontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Neat's foot
Provides gelatin, which sets the liquid into a firm jelly as it cools.
Eggs
Their whites clarify the liquid, collecting impurities so the aspic stays clear when strained.
Beetroots
Add colour and an earthy flavour to the aspic.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds acidity and aroma, brightening the flavour of the jelly.

The step that matters

Strain the mixture through a jelly bag. Straining must be gentle and unhurried, because pushing or squeezing the bag lets cloudy particles through. Clarified stock is then clear and sparkling rather than murky.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beetroot, parsley, egg, pepper, sugar, tarragon, vinegar):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beetroot, parsley, egg, pepper, sugar, tarragon, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More aspic recipes

Chicken 77Meat 26Tomato 25Jelly 16Lobster 14Beef 10 See all 167 →

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