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Aspic Jelly

Aspic jelly is a chilled meat gelatin made with ground meat, eggs, olives, and seasonings, set in a tin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Veal and liver match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 392 recipes. Both carry enoic acid, which smells butter, cheesy. The science ↓

Aspic Jelly

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mould

  1. Grind the cold meat using a meat grinder.

  2. Garnish a bread tin with sliced hard-boiled eggs, olives, and ground chicken livers if using chicken.

  3. Cover the garnished tin with ground meat until three-quarters full.

Make the jelly

  1. Soak the gelatine in 1 cup of cold water.

  2. Dissolve the bouillon cubes in 1 cup of boiling water.

  3. Add 2 more cups of boiling water.

  4. Pour the bouillon mixture over the dissolved gelatine.

  5. Season with onion juice, allspice, and salt and pepper to taste.

  6. Strain the mixture over the ground meat in the tin.

Chill and serve

  1. Cool the dish in a cold place for 5 hours.

  2. Turn out onto a platter and garnish with lettuce, radishes, and stuffed olives.

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. Veal + livertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together392 recipes

    Shared aroma: enoic acid (butter, cheesy).

  2. Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Olive + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,779 recipes

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

  4. Chicken + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  5. Olive + chickentop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,888 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid hexyl ester (sweet, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Gelatine
Sets the bouillon into a firm jelly that holds the meat and garnish in shape.
Bouillon cubes
Supply the savoury meaty flavour of the clear jelly.
Cold meat
Forms the body of the aspic, set in place by the jelly around it.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add firm texture and visual contrast when the aspic is sliced.

The step that matters

Strain the mixture over the ground meat in the tin. The jelly must be fully dissolved and at a pourable warmth before straining, so it settles evenly around the meat and garnish. Gelatine that is undissolved or too cool can leave lumps or uneven layers when it sets.

Swap the allspice

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, egg, olive, chicken, liver, onion, pepper):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Allspicethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, egg, olive, chicken, liver, onion, pepper. 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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