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To Make Aspic Jelly

A gelatinous dish made from meat stock, egg whites, lemon, spices, and herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,467 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Make Aspic Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the jelly

  1. Remove all grease from the cold meat jelly and wipe the top with a cloth.

  2. Melt the jelly and strain it through a fine strainer.

Make and clarify

  1. Beat the egg whites with ⅓ cup of cold water.

  2. Mix the strained jelly with the egg whites, lemon juice, lemon peel, cloves, celery or parsley, salt, and white pepper.

  3. Gently boil the mixture for 15 minutes, starting on the side or back of the stove.

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. Lemon + celerytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Clove + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  3. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Lemon + white peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,658 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Celery + white peppertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together853 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

What each ingredient does

Meat jelly or chicken stock
Forms the body of the aspic and sets into a firm, clear gel when cooled.
Egg whites
Bind to impurities as they heat, clarifying the jelly into a clear liquid.
Lemon
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the flavor of the jelly.

The step that matters

Gently boil the mixture for 15 minutes. The egg whites must be heated slowly so they form a raft that traps cloudy particles. Vigorous boiling breaks the raft apart and leaves the aspic cloudy.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, egg, lemon, clove, celery):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, egg, lemon, clove, celery. 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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