Delights From the Golden Age of Aspic
I’m not a great fan of sushi. Don’t get me wrong; I like a piece of raw herring as much as the next person, but the idea of fashion food scares me. I have seen where it can lead, and a frightful memory of different times haunts my soul — a time in my youth when culinary audacity knew no limits and food was
encased in colored jelly. I have seen the age of aspic.
Historically, aspic dishes date back to the early Middle Ages, and the first detailed recipe is found in the famous Le Viandier, a collection of French recipes published in 1395. Originally, aspic was not food per se, but rather a smart way to preserve food. Covering food with gelatine prevents it from going off and keeps out bacteria. With time, gelatinous goo also regularly began to appear on dessert trolleys. Aspic, however, did not fully come into its own right until the 20th century — and then it did so with a vengeance.
In the post-war consumer society of the 1950s, food became something you purchased. Where homemakers previously had spent a considerable amount of time actually producing food, readymade ingredients from the shelves of modern supermarkets now gave them ample time to prepare it. As producing
was replaced by shopping, meals became dinners and dinners became small works of art. You didn’t just cook, you made dinner.
Writers on the topic of homemaking, traditionally concerned with larder management and the craft of dressing fresh game, turned to the new world of culinary frills with glee. Recipes were now the name of the game, and every cooking magazine and home-keeping column competed for the most extravagant dishes. They found that aspic was the tool for the job. The gelatine could shape otherwise boring dishes into objets d’art that would have been readily accepted at the court of King Louis XVI. Lobster relish in jelly arranged with prawns and covered with jellied mayonnaise. Pear salad ring with ginger, green peppers and cheese balls, served with a pimento cottage cheese mix. Ring-Around-the-Tuna garnished with celery, cucumber, chopped pimiento and grated onions. Lemony salmon tower with anchovies, shrimps and herring in sour cream. There were few sacred cows. Everything imaginable was mixed, stirred, stacked and entombed in aspic. At times it was like no thought whatsoever was given to taste. Food was to be colorful and fun!
The aim was to delight and thrill your guests — little else. Articles of the time reveled in the extraordinary possibilities of gelatinous cooking, although the main advantage of aspic dishes (and perhaps their only redeeming feature) was that they could be prepared a day in advance, leaving the hostess free to focus on entertaining once the guests arrived. An added bonus was that nearly anything in jelly can be easily frozen — even salads.
Manufactures promised a flavorless (they wish) product that would set in minutes, enabling the chef to arrange the food freely in elaborate table decorations, according to some sort of gastronomic taxonomy. Very often the result resembled exotic deep sea creatures, or flying saucers from outer space. Perhaps intentionally ‘space age’, since most recipes are from the time of the
American Apollo program.
A by-product of the new supermarket lifestyle was that lots of new types of food became available, and few people actually knew how they tasted. The solution, according to cooking advice of the time, always seemed to be: cast it in a cube/mold of aspic and top it off with Miracle Whip. Unfortunately, the dishes suggested on the packaging, or by well-meaning food journalists, were often dishes that would make guest ask: what is it?
A question that was fundamentally irrelevant, as aspic never was about food and taste; it was all about presentation. It mattered little what was inside the quivering translucent substance. The dish was a decadent show of skill and proficiency intended to impress rather than delight. A lavish feast for the eye, showcasing the culinary prowess of the hostess — nothing says fancy like aspic says fancy!
Despite all its colorful fun, aspic did not survive the post-war generation. Tastes and trends changed with the budding globalization of the 1980s and 1990s, and by the new millennium aspic had been relegated to the dessert pages of avant-garde cook books — no longer fit to serve among friends.
Flicking through the pages of old magazines and cook books, aspic dishes now strike most people as revolting. It is not really the gelatine itself, but rather the baffling and bizarre combinations of different foodstuffs that characterized aspic cooking. I guess wartime children simply grew up with more robust stomachs. The generation who grew up without rationing cards and who could demand Italian pasta as a human right saw no reason to suffer jellied beefpudding and peas, topped with cheese balls and sauerkraut.
Nothing will ever be quite like the golden age of aspic. However, when looking to stack a varied selection of foodstuffs, or simply waterproof your salad, there is nothing to match the splendor of gelatine.
