While most of The Best of Electric Crockery Cooking (Jacqueline Hériteau, 1976) is rather practical and down-to-earth, suggesting recipes that will save time and money, it does have a fascination with aspics created in the older style-- before home cooks made them with powdered gelatin. I guess aspic must have still been considered rather glamorous in the 1970s, so the book recommended various ways to create it by using the crock pot as a starting point (rather than Knox).
There's the meaty version:
And of course, the 8-10 hours of cooking time is just the beginning. The aspic still has to be strained and set. And why serve just plain aspic when you can embellish it? Veal Knuckle in Aspic can be "a delicious, delicate dish for a buffet or a gala summer luncheon."
And if mammal meat isn't your thing, there are also chicken aspics, like Brandied Chicken Aspic.
And if you'd prefer something cold-blooded transformed into an aspic, you can also make fish aspic.
Use it as the basis for Canned Shrimp in Aspic.
So, yeah. Even if this book is very 1970s in some ways, it seems much older in others. Maybe the best old-fashioned way to end a meal of all this old-fashioned aspic is with some Homemade Mincemeat.
Yep-- the kind that included actual minced meat.
Part of me wonders why anybody in the '70s bothered with any of this-- if they did at all. But we all need hobbies, and there was no way for people to simply scan recipes and post them on the internet to make gentle fun of them back then. So why not spend a day or two cooking fish trimmings and then suspending canned shrimp, veggies, and hard-cooked eggs in the resulting goo? At least somebody would probably eat it, and they might even think you were fancy.
I remember seeing someone boiling down bones like this on a British TV show recreating life in the Victorian era. Their assessment was that it smelled bad, took a lot of work, and really wasn't worth it. According to the internet, the first crockpot patent was from the 1940s, and they were around some in the 50s. The Rival corporation started marketing them in 1971, which is when they became widely available to consumers. These feel like the dubious recipes that were written when microwaves came out. Yes, you can make your own aspic in these, just like you can cook a turkey in the microwave, but neither is a good idea.
ReplyDelete