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Aspic Jelly

Aspic jelly with fillets, radishes, lettuce, and meatballs fried in hot fat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Radish and lettuce share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 58 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Aspic Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the aspic

  1. Pour the aspic jelly into a mold with the fillets and set aside to firm up.

  2. Turn the jelly out onto a crystal dish and fill the center with radishes and lettuce leaves.

Make the balls

  1. Chop the meat from the bird bones very finely and rub it through a sieve.

  2. Mix the chopped meat with the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs, parsley, salt, pepper, bread crumbs, and the yolk of one raw egg.

  3. Form the mixture into balls, dusting your hands with flour.

  4. Brush the balls with beaten egg and coat them in bread crumbs.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat hot fat until blue steam rises, then drop in the balls and fry until golden.

  2. Arrange the fried balls around the mold and sprinkle with chopped aspic jelly.

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. Radish + lettucetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together58 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

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

  3. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Radish + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together120 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Lettuce + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Aspic jelly
Sets into a clear, firm gel that holds the dish together and gives it a glossy finish.
Raw egg yolk
Binds the meat mixture so the balls hold their shape while frying.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Add richness and a crumbly, creamy texture to the filling.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture in the filling and form a golden, crisp outer coating when fried.
Meat from bird bones
Provides the savory base of the filling that the balls are made from.

The step that matters

Fry the balls in properly hot fat. If the fat is not hot enough, the coated balls absorb oil and turn greasy instead of crisping quickly. Sufficiently hot fat seals the crumb coating so it browns evenly while the filling heats through.

Swap the radish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, meat, egg, parsley, pepper, bread, flour):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Radishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, meat, egg, parsley, pepper, bread, flour. 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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