Aspic is back for the '20s dinner party

Came for the D&D references. Left disappointed.

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I appreciate the several minutes of quiet in this video. Life doesn’t need a constant soundtrack like a department store. I wish more video creators took this approach.

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You mean a gelatinous cube?
You’re welcome :smiley:

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Gelatinous cubes are boring after they became vegan. They just sit there blocking the tunnel, thinking “I am not eating that!”

Adventurers used to fight for their lives, now they can just get a cartload of fruit and veg from the nearest town market.

Yes, I know, gelatinous cubes don’t think

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Have you actually tried these baffling cakes? Because they are delicious. Light, usually not too sweet, with lots of cream and fruit. I’ll take that over a heavy Black Forest cake or similar everyday

Classic trap: The party enters a long hallway with a slight downward incline. The hall appears to dead end; inspection of the wall at the end will reveal a small hole. There is a distant noise like a boot being pulled out of mud, and a slight suction may be noted at the hole. Party members who try to leave soon discover that the hall is now blocked by a gelatinous cube. Air leaves through the hole, allowing the cube to inch down towards the party. Blocking the hole will stop the cube from advancing for a while, but there is a limited air supply…

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I mean… You don’t have to make aspic to eat pigs feet or snouts. I’m not a big fan of the texture, but my roommate used to fix big pots of pigs feet that smelled/tasted amazing.

Jellied meats has always been a staple in French charcuterie, I’m thinking fromage de tete or ‘head cheese’ (not sure if this counts with the jelly coming from a pigs head).

Huge fan of Julia Child as she is the perfect time capsule of a particular authentic French cuisine and her technique is beyond reproach. Also she is hilarious! I’m sure I’ve seen her do aspic in the same series but couldn’t find it so here is the 18 second French omelette:

My favorite line from Hitchcock’s Psycho is from the detective questioning the veracity of presented evidence “if it gels it’s aspic… and this ain’t aspic”

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Do it, do, it… you know The Gobbler is just a few clicks away…

https://www.lileks.com/institute/motel/

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Indeed. It’s not really my thing but my dad eats Sülze all the time.

 
 
 


 
 
 

The fact that I couldn’t take Melton Mowbray pork pies home with me like I used to do when visiting the UK was unironically one of the most aggravating effects of Brexit to me.

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Tbf this type of cake with the fruit set in aspic is the standard and traditional way of making fruit cake in Germany. I’ve always thought it’s probably to preserve the freshness of the fruit for a few days when sold in cafés and bakeries. It’s especially common with strawberry cake but also with general mixed fruit cakes.

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They still do.

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Hard pass. Better photography does not equal better tasting.

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That’s aspic on the first cake, but just a plain or perhaps apricot glaze on the fruit tart. It goes on with a brush or a spray gun.

I’m pretty sure it’s this stuff and not a glaze:

You can see how it looks next to the cake.

Tbf that Wikipedia article says that these days it’s almost exclusively agar or carageen, not gelatin.

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No Aspic is complete without hard boiled eggs.

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It’s true! I own recent reprints of her books and while the actual recipes are a little dated, the fundamentals are still the same and really what the books are about. There’s a whole section on the right way to chop mushrooms. :grin: I confess to enjoying flipping through them more than actually cooking from them. They’re pretty intimidating in many areas.

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Head Cheese is relatively popular in Canada as well. Popular enough that every butcher shop and grocery store sells it. It’s not for me, but more power to those who like it. :grinning:

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I was hoping for “a maze of twisty passages, all filled with aspic.”

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Drat! You got me!

TIL that one of my favorite architectural styles is called “Googie”. Keep your nasty, stained-cement Brutalism, give me a living room straight out of The Jetsons!

“There was an informal architectural style called Googie, named for a coffee-shop chain in LA; the diners had heaps of rough stone, cantilevered roofs, odd modern touches side-by-side with kitschy anachronisms. Well, this is Post-Googie. The jet-age futurism of the 60s had turned into the cheap, Logan’s-Run modernism of plastic chairs; the experimentation with different materials had ended up in a smothering expanse of mass-produced carpet. This is a style that can go absolutely nowhere. It’s the look of the future for at least a week.”

That was wonderful, thanks.

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