Aruvgan, I vaguely remember someone telling me that aspic itself is made from the marrow of beef bones, and true aspic is translucent, not transparent, and has a mild beef flavor. Is that your experience with it? Or is my memory, indeed, the first thing to go?
Every time I watch cooking shows, all of the professional chefs seem to be smoking like chimneys.
That’s basically how my parents make aspic. Aspic is pretty popular in Polish cuisine, and you’ll find it at some of the Polish delis around here under the name galaretka. It’s also seen in Hungarian cuisine as kocsonya (and it’s a traditional New Year’s dish, like black eyed peas and greens are in some parts of the US) , and you’ll find it all around that part of the world. The gelling agent in aspic is, of course, gelatin, and that is made by making a bone-rich broth; veal or pork shanks or trotters are popular choices in Polish cuisine. This Ukrainian recipe is pretty similar to what my parents make, except they also add peas to the aspic. They will occasionally cheat and use powdered, unflavored gelatin if they don’t have enough meat bones on hand. Personally, I love the stuff, especially drizzled with vinegar (as is customary to serve) and a slice of hearty rye bread, but I know very few people my generation (I’m 40) who do, unless they were born in the motherland.
I’m sorry, but no way the stuff in “Unholy recipes…” originated in classic French cuisine. Hot dog salad dressing? Vienna sausage shortcake?
The poached egg in aspic doesn’t look too disgusting, assuming you are okay with veal aspic, but the “Ballettes of Foie Gras à l’Impériale” looks like the face-eater eggs from Alien. Then again, maybe some folks like grey-green food. None for me, thanks.
OK, quote feature seems screwed up for me again today.
Aspic is gelatin rendered from bones with connective tissue - marrow is fatty, more like butter. Neither product is related to each other use-wise other than you eat them. Best way to discover aspic is to roast a while chicken, then let the pan juices chill in the fridge. That gel under the fat layer is aspic without the labor of simmering then filtering about 10 pounds of animal parts per rough gallon of water and assorted herbs and aromatics.
And as to the relationship of ‘convenience’ foods to classic French cuisine - jello was marketed specifically to the non-wealthy as a way to have the elaborate aspic based foods without the expense and trouble of rendering down several dollars of ingredients for I vaguely remember as advertised for 10 cents per box/dish for the powdered gelatin [it came in both sweet and savory flavors, can’t remember offhand when they stopped with the celery and tomato flavors] so if you will grant me the recipes in these ‘horrors of jello’ articles you get desserts [generally fruits and stuff like cottage cheese suspended in fruit jello] and salads [generally shredded veggies, crap like pickles, cottage cheese, mayo and shredded cooked meat suspended in various flavors of jello or gelatin made with various liquids] as an attempt by the food laboratory of one company or another to emulate classic cuisine like oeufs en gelee, or poularde a la neve - chicken in aspic with a cream sauce as rendered as shredded chicken, cottage cheese and jello blenderized then molded [or horrors, tuna, peas, mayo and gelatin molded … blech. Even I don’t like that though coating a cooked then chilled tuna steak in aspic and serving it with flavored mayo on the side is pretty tasty in the summer.
By the way, I spent a fair amount of time about 10 miles away from Leroy NY, home of Jello … they have a jello museum.
this counts, I think:
Raw cookie-dough batter!!!.. while mom was still mixing the ingredients.
It tasted terrific in 1960, and best of all…it wasn’t even dangerous back then!*
I’d eat more of the dough than the finished cookies.
*(The humor author Bill Bryson has a book about his childhood (in the 1950’s) when “everything was a sign of progress, and everything was good for you.” Smoking was good for you, food additives were good for you, asbestos was good for you (fireproof classrooms!), even nuclear bombs were good for you. In Nevada they advertised houses in the new suburbs, near the most advanced atomic testing site in the world.
One of my daughter’s favourite drinks had the recipe changed to include sucralose a couple years ago. She quit drinking it because the new version tasted so bad.
I remember when a lot of people had their own meat grinders at home, and as the raw, ground meat came out into the bowl, kids would be allowed to grab and eat chunks like it was raw cookie dough. I didn’t like the way it tasted, so I didn’t eat it, but I don’t remember being disgusted by it, the way most people, even non-vegetarians, are, by the thought of eating raw ground meat.
I don’t remember it, but my mother says it was possible to buy lots of not-very-desirable cuts of meat in butcher stores. People might buy one prime cut, some select cuts, and some organ meat, and grind their own hamburger that way. They didn’t trust the ground beef from the store. It might have horsemeat or something in it.
A lot of people liked to make their own sausage, too.
My mother knows someone who lives in an old house with a mounted, hand-cranked meat grinder, and when the husband had to cut way back on cholesterol, they started grinding their own burgers and sausages again.
Sometime in the 1970s/1980s. pork underwent a change, as high fat/high cholesterol foods became frowned upon. The pork industry bred for leanness, instead of fat, as prior to this, they were bred to be fat, so they could be used for lard AND meat.
Now they’re primarily bred for lean meat, and that’s probably the majority of why your pork roasts seem dry and tasteless. Loin roast isn’t very fatty at best, and with modern pig breeds, they’re even less so, making them easy to overcook into dry tastelessness.
You might try getting some of the pricey “heritage breed” pork like that sold by Niman Ranch or a whole bunch of other small farm outfits. They’re supposed to be selling meat from old-timey breeds like Berkshire and Mangalitsa hogs.