Aspic
molded meat gelatin dish
Aspic () or meat jelly is a savoury gelatin made with a meat stock or broth, set in a mold to encase other ingredients. These often include pieces of meat, seafood, vegetable, or eggs. Aspic is also sometimes referred to as aspic gelée or aspic jelly. In its simplest form, aspic is essentially a gelatinous version of conventional soup.
History
Meat aspics were made before fruit- and vegetable-flavoured aspics. A poetic reference is given by the poet Ibrahim ibn al-Mahdi, who described in the 9th century a gelled dish prepared with Iraqi carp, as "like ruby on the platter, set in a pearl ... steeped in saffron thus, like garnet it looks, vibrantly red, shimmering on silver". By the Middle Ages, cooks had discovered that a thickened meat broth could be made into a jelly. The Dongjing Meng Hua Lu mentioned two types of meat aspic in the restaurants of Kaifeng, the Northern Song dynasty capital: "Crystalline Sliced Meat" (水晶膾) and "Jiangchi" (薑豉).
A detailed recipe for aspic is found in Le Viandier, written around 1375.
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This entry incorporates text from “Aspic” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.