Go check out the link I have above.
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Looks like an interesting book.
I made pork pies once with no food processor. Soooooooo much hand chopping. If the jelly extends the shelf life for a bit after all that work, no wonder. Seems to get used for other labor intensive stuff too (jellied eels)
The first time I ate a meal with my bride’s beloved great aunt and uncle, the meal started with a dish of tomato aspic. Somehow, our marriage survived.
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I’m not falling for your Lileks trap! I’ve got far too much to do today!
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literally the only reference to “aspic” i’ve ever heard before. Now I know what aspic is.
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Truly an aspicious occasion.
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Oh god these are good. I lived not far from there for a bit and these helped me gain quite a bit of weight. So, so tasty.
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This is something I always think of when people are criticizing hot dog ingredients or pink slime or good ol’ gelatin, whatever one thinks of the taste or no matter one’s delicate sensibilities, if one is a carnivore one should want the whole animal to be put to good use and waste nothing.
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it is easily possible to connect the dots between uses of gelatin, “fine trimmings”, and any number of texture altering agents with molecular gastronomy. el bulli or alinea might be more subtle but there was certainly no dearth of creativity in the earliest uses of these materials.
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My grandmother, a child of the depression in Canada, would lightly boil chicken carcasses to get the last little meat and fat bits off before saving the bones for stock. She’d put all the little bits in an aspic she called “pressed chicken.” It horrified my brother and I as kids and my uncle would lean over and say things like “it squirms on the way down” as we tried to choke down our dinners.
I can’t deal with gelatin to this day.
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The aspic here is just complicating a type of cake that baffles me - the simple sponge cake with cream and fruit that inexplicably has seem to have become the go-to Western-style cake in a lot of East Asia. I consider it the most boring type of cake possible, but I’ve been in a number of Chinese and Korean-run bakeries that offer only variations of this cake and a lot of my Korean and Chinese friends and co-workers go nuts over them.
Yeah, and up until the 20th century the flavorless gelatin used in desserts was a real luxury item - people made it at home via a long and laborious process, so you really needed a big kitchen staff. Mass production of granules really changed things. Gelatin-based desserts went from the fanciest thing you could eat to something everyone ate, which I think did something screwy culturally and lead to the gelatin-based party-dish abominations of the '50s-'70s.
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I like them best hot, with mushy peas.
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There’s always time to visit The Institute of Official Cheer!
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It was more the Melton Mowbray bit that was protected. One could still buy “pork pies”. There are sufficient crap Melton Mowbray pies that the designation means nothing. Another fascinating PDO fact: for a long time, Stilton cheese couldn’t be made in Stilton.
Edit: apparently it still can’t!
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There seems something vaguely transgressive about turning your food’s endoskeleton into a protective exoskeleton during preparation.
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I think I might have that somewhere.
Funny, my wife was making something this morning and I heard her say “Why didn’t I listen to Julia Child. You ignore her at your own peril” (when it comes how things are done, especially the basics).
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Nope. - Gustavo Woltmann
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Been missing the 19A0s references! 
Also, a bunch of fruit suspended in gelatin – sounds kind of tasty to me. 
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