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Aspic Jelly

Aspic jelly is a gelatinous stock made from boiled fowl and veal with herbs and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Aspic Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the stock

  1. Place the fowl and veal in a saucepan and cover with water.

  2. Bring to a boil slowly and skim.

  3. Simmer until meat is soft.

  4. Add celery, shallot, carrot, herbs, cloves, mace, peppercorns, and salt.

  5. Simmer for 20 minutes.

  6. Remove the fowl and meat.

Reduce and strain

  1. Continue simmering the stock until reduced by half.

  2. Strain and cool.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Fowl
Breaks down during long simmering, releasing gelatin and body into the stock.
Neck of veal
Rich in collagen, which converts to gelatin and helps the stock set when cooled.
Celery
Adds aromatic flavor to the stock as it simmers.

The step that matters

Reducing the stock by half. Simmering concentrates the gelatin and flavor. Reducing too little leaves the stock too weak to set, while over-reducing can make it overly salty or cloudy.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, celery, shallot, carrot, parsley, clove):

  1. Winter savoryfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, celery, shallot, carrot, parsley, clove. 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.

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