October 6, 2017 • 36 mins
The concept of savory, broth-based gelatin molds may sound strange to the modern palate, but they were posh for centuries. Tune in to learn about history's fanciest aspics, plus the science of gelatin.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hello, and welcome to food Stuff. I'm Anny Rees and
I'm Lauren Folgelbaum, and today we're talking about aspects. You
might remember we mentioned this in a listener mail that
we read a couple episodes ago from Sierra. Thank you Sierra,
because it was such a wonderful discovery for me. I've
never heard of these things. I laughed so hard. I
(00:32):
was horrified. Growing growing up watching a lot of Julia
Child videos. Um, I I had definitely been exposed to that,
and also my my dad had had a little bit
of training in classical French cooking. So if you haven't
seen a picture of one of these things, look them
up the literal second you get a chance, like the second.
They're so strange and they're so funny. Because okay, because
(00:52):
what what is an aspect? Yes, it's basically savory jellouh
before you freak out, Okay, have you ever enjoyed us
a say tan katsu raman or like a nice rich
stock or like a bone broth kind of thing? Uh,
savory gelatin a k A aspect is a chilled version
of the same thing. Uh. You take broth or stock
(01:15):
or consummate, which is another term for clarified stock, and
you jellify it, chill it, and mold it into decorative shapes,
sometimes with meat or vegetables or hard boiled eggs or
whatever else you can imagine put inside of it. I
am trying to hold back from laughing just hearing the description. Okay,
but like ideally, the point of an aspect is is
(01:35):
that you know it phase changes at your body temperature
a k a. Melts, so you wind up with this
spoonful of cold, delicious broth on your tongue. Mm hmm.
They look ludicrous. They look absolutely just gross and very
silly and wiggly and meaty, very meaty and vegetably olive.
(01:59):
You sometimes, yeah, I mean now you have to look
them up if you haven't done it already. And every
every gelatine mold that you can imagine has had an
aspect in it at some point, definitely probably something you
can't imagine. There were definitely some things I never would
have imagined that I stumbled in aspect jelly or delay.
(02:21):
If your fancy can also be used as a kind
of decoration or like condiment for cold dishes. Um it
can be like a flavorful, pretty topping that you put
on top of a pettet's or tureens. Or you can
use it as a thin like brushed on glaze on
cold presentations of sliced meat or seafood to give them
that nice sheen. Oh yes, you want all your food
(02:42):
to be shiny, obviously. Uh. Sometimes the jelly part is
basically inedible or at least very unpleasant um, and is
simply in heavy scare quotes, a way to show off
the time and money that you have at your disposal. Uh,
Like like putting it a whole cooked salmon inside a
(03:03):
purely decorative aspect mold. Don't we all love having to
dig through basically an inedible jelly to get to a
whole cooked salmon. That's what I do at all of
my fancy parties. Annie. This is why I've never invited you.
I didn't think you could handle it. I promised to
be less judgmental. But you have to invite me to
(03:24):
one of these. Now now that I know about it,
I have to go, I guess so. In the middle
of our research for this. By the way, um, a
blogger slash YouTuber by the name of Emmy as an
Emmy made in Japan had a post about spaghetti jello
go viral as I have been told what the kids
say these days, they I guess, um, Uh, spaghetti jello
(03:46):
is like a savory tomato based jello mold with spaghettios
in it. Um the way that she's made it anyway, Um,
you might have seen this video and it is it
basically counts as an aspect. Yeah, it does. Um. I
did have a friend whose mom she was notorious for
her interesting cooking, we'll say, And one time I came
(04:08):
over and she said she had orange jello with cabbage. Huh.
I didn't try it. I didn't see it because of
those words enough as a kid, I was like, no, no,
But I guess maybe that was an aspect. Maybe she
was offering me some form of an aspect. It might
have counted. I certainly growing up, my um my grandmother
(04:29):
in Ohio would serve gelatins salads, um, which would be
like lime jello with maybe shredded carrots or something like
that inside of it. And it was definitely a side
salad and it was definitely like sweet jello with carrots
in it. I love that people call them salads. It's
one of my favorite things. We'll do anything to like
(04:50):
sound healthy, but really, yeah, I mean it, it's green.
Oh boy, yep, that's what counts these day. And we
laugh or maybe shutter at these now, but at one
time they were reserved for the finest of the fine
dining experience. Absolutely. Yeah. So let's look at the history
(05:11):
of these things. Aspects are relatively new, new kid on
the block, but they might be older than you think.
The first instances of aspects most likely go back to
eighteenth century France. Yes, France, Like we're kind of mentioned
in the beginning of the podcast, so yeah, yeah, that's
spoiler alerts. Sorry, she totally spoiled it. The first instance
(05:35):
of gelatine making didn't involve food at all. Instead, scraps
and bones left over after an animal carcass had been
picked clean would be boiled down to collagen that was
then used as an adhesive for cave painting. Yeah. Good
old Pliny mentions that Romans did a similar thing to
produce strong fish glue. Yeah. Gelatine useful for many things.
(05:56):
We'll get into some of that into science section later on.
Aspects were preceded by fourteenth century medieval Savory gelatin dishes
called jellies that were made with boiled pig feet and
ears filtered through cough. I found one recipe by the
name of a jelly of flesh that sounds so good,
(06:16):
sounds so metal it does it could be a band.
The molded shapes delighted the medieval ive. They added bonus
that the meats and produced inside the gelatine usually could
prevent spoilage for a little longer by cutting off the
air supply from oxygen hungry bacteria. Right. Uh. The word
jelly or gelatine may come, by the way, from the
(06:38):
Latin gelata, meaning frozen, indicating that the liquid and anything
that you put in it would be frozen in place.
Also gelato. Yeah. Sure. Recipes for other savory gelatin dishes
use calves and sheep's feet instead of pigs. One calls
for white wine, ginger, annis, cinnamon, pepper, nutmeg, mace, and
(06:59):
saffron in the mix. Uh, and and all that would
then be strained and poured over chopped hens and the
meat from the cow and or sheep's feet. So fancy
sounds delightful, and making these dishes was just a serious
pain in the in the calf's foot, you'd have to
boil the animal parts for several hours, then strain all
(07:21):
of the solids out and let the remaining liquid settle
for an entire day and night, so that the fat
would rise to the top for skin for skimming. Um
that the remaining stuff was gelatine that could be reheated
and then flavored and molded. There was also a specific
dish I found called um galantine a galantine. No, No,
(07:43):
it's spelled like Galantine's day, but I think it's pronounced Galantine.
And it was made of a minced meat and other
stuff that was pressed into sort of like a round
loaf and then coated in the savory gelatine with a
heavy spice blend. It was popular enough that Chaucer mentions
it in his slid to rosamond Um. We got our
compatriot Jonathan Strickland, who is an erstwhile student of Middle English,
(08:06):
to read the original for us. Nos, never peak wallowed
in garlandin as e in LoVa, I'm wallowed on. In
case you didn't catch all of that, it means something like, uh,
never was Pike so imbued in Gallantine as I in
love am imbued and wounded. Wow, that's some serious stuff.
(08:32):
Chaucer was so thirsty. Oh my goodness. Okay. Uh. If
you want to hear more from from Jonathan Strickland, by
the way, you can catch him on the podcast tech
Stuff and also on the Facebook live show called Game
Changers on How Stuff Works Facebook page. Yeah, super fun people,
history of board games, people playboard games, video games, all
kinds of things. Yeah, check them out, Thank you Jonathan. Anyway,
(08:55):
uh so, these sorts of recipes pop up in upper
class cookbooks from all over Europe. The British Museum Cookbook
reports they were often decorated with edible gold and silver
leaf to make them that much more extra showy. Yes. Uh.
And these cold dishes might have been especially popular due
to the theory of using food to balance humors. That
(09:18):
that whole concept of cool versus hot, and wet versus
dry that's going on in our bodies and in the
universe around us. Um so, so, cold dishes made with
gelatine were recommended, especially for people with hot and moist temperaments,
um like youth and adolescence or during towards southern summers.
(09:39):
One of these days, we're going to do an episode
on humors. I feel like they keep popping up. Yeah,
and I'm not entirely sure, but I am interested in
hot and moist temperaments. That's a great descriptor. I think
I've known a few people like that, Oh have you?
I think we all do anyway to please the Friday
(09:59):
non eating Catholic crowd. Chef's got the idea to boil
some eels in the stock of a fish like cod,
and also swim bladders to make Catholic approved fish jellies.
That sounds very appetizing. Oh yeah. Meanwhile, in the late
fifteen hundreds, a fellow sometimes called Europe's first celebrity chef,
(10:20):
wrote about his technique of using egg whites to help
clarify stock for gelatine. That was Maestro Martino di como Um,
who was Italian if you could not tell, And we'll
talk more about that works also in our science section below.
Towards the end of the medieval era, the definition of
jelly expanded to include sweets, some made with either pecton
(10:42):
or The Russian discovered eyes and glass, which was derived
from beluga bladder surgeons. That doesn't sound as fancy as
eyes and glass, absolutely not. Rose water was a popular
flavoring for these sweet jellies. And this was also about
the time that the terram flummery came into existence, which
is usually reserved for for sweet gelled dishes, but has
(11:05):
sometimes been used to hold at savory ingredients as well.
Flummery sounds like something you'd exclaim, flambert, what flubbery? Is
this that the meaning of the word has has expanded
to mean something kind of like insubstantial and silly excellent?
I might incorporate that absolutely. Apart from the Lord of
(11:26):
the rings, sounding eyes and glass, there were a few
other competitors of gelatine. In sixteen sixty Japan, it was
discovered that if you processed red seaweed you could get content,
a seaweed based jelly that was especially popular in Asia.
Europeans called it a garagar, and Northern Europe also had
a method for boiling irish moss or red seaweed until
(11:48):
they derived kara guinan. I've actually never known how to
say that, which they then used to thicken things up.
Other sources of jellification included heart's horn, which is made
from the horns of deer um and ivory shavings very
very fancy. Indeed, Indeed, it wasn't until sixteen eighty two,
(12:09):
that gelatine technology took another leap with French mathematician Dennis
Papen's invention of the wonderfully named steam digester. Steam digester,
this thing extracted gelatine after some serious animal bone boiling.
The first industrial galatin extracting didn't happen until eighteen eighteen. Wow.
Seventeen eighty nine marks the first time the word appeared
(12:31):
written in English aspect yes, yes, and at the time
it meant a cold dish of meat, fish, eggs, et cetera,
set in molded jelly. The English got it from the French,
but beyond that, the origins are kind of a mystery. Yeah,
aspect was also a French term at the time for
a type of lavenders, so maybe it got the name
from lavender seasoning that was used in recipes. But some
(12:55):
food historians and entomologists trace it to the Greek word aspis,
which literally meant around shield but had become a name
for snakes, especially ones with rounded hoods, and that's where
we get the word asp from. The shield part would
certainly make sense in terms of protecting food inside the jelly,
or the snake part might refer to the bright colors
(13:15):
that are that are used that we're used in in
these uh, these aspects, you know, colored with stuff like
extracts of sandal wood for red, saffron for yellow, and
boiled blood for black. And William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair,
one of the characters, Spoilers, died an aspect of plover's eggs.
(13:38):
Does that sound good? The famous French dictionary Lee Trey
from around that time lists as cold as an aspect
as a proverbial phrase. Speaking of proverbs, The Brits apparently
used one to this day that is set in aspect,
which means something that's stubbornly jilled in its outdated ways. Yes,
(14:00):
and this was used in a recent headline about British politics.
So so it's great, Yeah, still in use. Love it.
There was an amazing variety of fanciful aspects described in
a cookbook from seventeen sixty nine called The Experienced English
Housekeeper by one Elizabeth Raffled. And she laid out just
(14:22):
these spectacular jellies that were made with calf's footstock clarified
with egg whites. Picture if you will, whole pigeons roasted
with sprigs of myrtle stuck in their beaks, encased in
clear gelatine, or a gelatine fish pond made with a
large and small colored flummery fishes also encased in clear gelatine,
(14:43):
or a hen's nest made out of shredded lemon peel
set in gelatine, filled with gelatin eggs molded in real eggshells,
or with molded gelatine chickens. I I want to hang
out with this lady. She sounds fabulous, so fabulous. But
Aspects Heyday had not yet arrived, and soon they would
be propelled into culinary fame by one extra famous chef.
(15:07):
But before we get to that, let's take a quick
break for a word from our sponsor, and we're back.
Thank you, sponsor. The person we have to thank for
bringing Aspects into the limelight Lime Lights. It's a major foreshadowing.
(15:31):
Pun was the famous nineteenth century chef Antonin Karrem who
we talked about for a decent bit during our French
Cuisine episode. He is also known as one of the
first celebrity chefs. He adored these things and to do
it right, in his mind, you needed a calf's foot.
(15:52):
And that's because, as we said before you had to
boil it down clarify it said it because of the
time involved asked were extremely expensive and almost exclusively by
the rich, acting as centerpieces on tables that overfloweth with
the core of food and drink. It was assumed that
if you presented an aspect in such a manner, you
(16:14):
must have a weight staff who did all the work
for you. And in Korem's terminology he called this chauffeur
are cooked hot, served cold. Yes. And like we mentioned
in our French food episode, Korem was a chef under Napoleon,
so that aspects he perfected were towering, multilayered structures to behold,
(16:34):
sometimes composing tableau. His final cookbook, published posthumously, featured an
entire chapter complete with diagrams. Diagrams on the mighty extremely
customizable aspect. Yeah, just these these ribboned layers of different colors,
and they looked like castles, and they had these turrets
(16:54):
and it was huh, it was a lot. Yes, they're
pretty great. Looks them up. The European Association of Luxury
and Aspect made the journey across to the American colonies,
where they were popular with rich Southern plantation owners and
where they were probably made by slaves and rich elite
in New York. And you wouldn't believe who's popping up
(17:16):
again but Thomas Jefferson. Of course, he combined French wine
and the French aspect to offer guests at Bunicello wine jellies.
That sounds pretty lovely. The industrial evolution brought the aspect
to a wider audience with the invention of package to gelatine. Yes,
(17:37):
New York glue manufacturer Peter Cooper patented a powdered mix
of processed sugar, spices, eggs, and lemon. He called the
first dessert gelatine mix. However, and the words of Jello
Gallery dot Org, it didn't really jell with the American
publish They beat us to that one. They did. It was, however, expensive,
(18:00):
being that it was a byproduct of the meat industry,
which gave enterprising folks the motivation to work with it.
And meanwhile, aspect based dishes never really went out of
fashion in most of Europe. Of Victorians, for example, were
mad about complex gelled dishes like a Foi gras set
in bombshell gelatine molds decorated with ringlets, stamped out of
(18:21):
egg set on beds of more gelatin, and also artichokes.
Part of the draw of these things is that they
could be prepared a day ahead, leaving the day of
the party for other business. Oh man, they sounds so epic.
A couple of years later and Pearl we Weight, who
made cough syrups, added food coloring to the mix of
(18:44):
like dry gelatine powder to create a product. His wife
suggested he call jellou Yes that Jello, which he patented
that year, but two years later he sold it to
Genesee Food Company for four and fifty dollars, which is
around about eleven thousand of today's American dollars, which I
guess isn't super shabby unless you consider the empire that
(19:07):
Jello is. By nine hundred, Genese Food Company was putting
out pamphlets and short cookbooks complete with Jello recipes to
increase demand. They weren't the only ones promoting Jello in
the early nineteen hundreds either. Companies that manufactured chillers or
refrigerators got in the game too. For instance, General Electric
came out with a cookbook to help you get the
(19:28):
most out of your new refrigerator. If you take a
look at the salad section. Yes, the salad section, a
majority of them are aspects. And these ad campaigns were
very successful. Jello and the aspect really took off in
the United States. Housewives like them because they were quick, cheap.
The dessert ones even saved you sugar, increase the life
(19:48):
of leftovers, and this was really important during the Great Depression.
And yet they somehow managed to keep this sort of
show stopper luxurious reputation in part do the time it
took for the gelatine to set and also they were
the one of the least messy things you could feed
you kids. Oh along those lines, there's a there's a
(20:08):
book called Perfection Salad written by food historian Laura Shapiro
about women in cooking around the turn of the twentieth century,
and she writes that this concept of the cleanliness of
food literally and psychologically was just a major motivator at
the time, which we've previously discussed in various episodes about
the rise of a clean eating culture promoted by people
(20:29):
like A. Graham and Kellogg, you know, the pure food craze.
Shapiro wrote of the gelatine salad a salad at lasting
control of itself. At Last, at Last, Jello did a
good job of capitalizing on the nineteen o six Food
and Drug Act, advertising it's safety pouch and using the
(20:49):
word pure three times. This act was prompted by Upton
Sinclair's The Jungle, which is that infamous look into the
realities of the meat industry. It's a rough one, but
definitely worth reading. In jello debut, the smash hit Jello
Girl that hailed the product as all that was pure
and innocent about childhood sugar. And thus Jello was ration
(21:13):
during World War One, which put a damp errou on things,
but the product came back swinging once the war was over,
helped along by the Great Depression and new flavor lime Jello. Apparently,
the flavor was so loved entire cookbooks were devoted to it.
Another development that helped gelatin salads popularity that popularization of
(21:35):
the electric refrigerator. By the end of the nineteen thirties,
about sixty percent of households in America had one um,
and they kept food cooler more consistently. The Oxford Encyclopedia
of Food and Drink in America estimates it up to
a third of all recipes printing cookbooks at the time
involved gelatine. That's crazy, A jello wasn't the only gelatine
(21:55):
in the game. Charles Knox of Knox Unflavored Gelatine touted
his reduct at the nineteen o four World's Fair. A
year later, The Perfection Salad The Resty Not the book
made its debut at a Knox sponsored cooking contest in Pennsylvania.
This aspect consisted of finally shopped cabbage, celery, and red pepper.
(22:17):
It one third place, and in nineteen seventy two, James
Beard wrote that this aspects triumph unleashed a demand for
congealed salads that has grown alarmingly, particularly in the suburbs.
These salads, it still feels weird to call them. That.
We're perceived as a lady food, so light and delicate. Huh.
(22:38):
The title of knox Yales and cookbook was Dainty Desserts
for Dainty People. Oh, man, I don't think that's a
book marketed to us. Anny, No, I don't think so.
And yet they still held on to their higher status
when during World War Two, serving an aspect was kind
of like saying to your friends you could throw quite
the dinner party or gathering rations are no rations. And
(23:01):
there was also an interesting social transition happening regarding the
role of a good housewife. Um A NIFT survey asked
women to report their thoughts on a housewife who brought
instant coffee versus one who brewed coffee. The women did
not go easy on the housewife who purchased the instant coffee,
(23:22):
calling her lazy, disorganized, and a bad wife. Ouch yeah.
At the same time, the time and cost efficiency of
making instant and manufactured products, along with the rate of
profits seen by the producers of these things during during
World War Two, meant that they weren't going anywhere. A
housewife needed to be efficient and thrifty, but also put
(23:45):
time and effort into the meals she cooked, as it
was seen as her role. If you just put jello
in a bowl, it wasn't beaut as cooking. So what
do you do. Let's make this fancy looking aspect cheaply
and efficiently and hit all the checkboxes. The aesthetic was key,
and this was done with other cheap processed foods as well.
(24:06):
Think hot dogs being used to make pigs and blanket
for example. At their height, there were all kinds of
crazy recipes like lime jello with canned tuna, and man
the terminology and the cookbooks words like sinkers and floaters. Yeah,
painting quite the image there to make the gelatine less
(24:28):
see through you at mayo or cream. And until the
nineteen seventies you could buy savory jello flavors like celery
and Italian salad. This is not a thing that I knew,
and I'm horrified, but kind of intrigued, very very intrigued. Oh,
I wondered. I'm sure that you could reproduce this with
(24:49):
some unflavored gelatine in your own seasonings at home. I'm
sure that's worth an experiment for sure. And speaking of
the nineteen seventies, that's about the time the Aspect bubble burst. Yep,
what happened, you ask? Changing views on dieting and nutrition
happened For the last several years of their reign. Aspects
started skiing more and more towards dessert, and then there
(25:11):
was this damaging suns tried tomato fad. Yeah, I can't
put a dried thing in a wet thing. Sure, if
that doesn't make sense. No, women started working easier than gelatine,
microwave friendly meals hit the shelves. It pretty much died
out save for parts of the Midwest and South. One
of my favorite descriptions I came across when researching this
(25:32):
called the aspect a culinary fossil and a ghost. I know, oh,
I know several chefs who would who are offended. They
would disagree strong. Obviously, jello is still around. They retooled
after the aspects demise, quote unquote, marketing themselves as a
snack our dessert option. I believe they called themselves the
(25:54):
number one best selling dessert in the world. I'll have
to look into that more, but I'm pretty sure there
is one state where aspects of the savory variety remained
very popular. It's all especially among the Mormon population. The
state named it their state snack in two thousand one,
and the region is sometimes called the Jello Belt. An
(26:16):
aspect like things have stuck around in Asian American cuisine,
as a dumpling filling, for example. Absolutely. So that's kind
of a round up of this weird and wild history
of aspects until now. Yeah, and now we've got some
of the science behind aspects for you. But first we've
got another quick word from our sponsor, and we're back,
(26:46):
Thank you sponsor. Okay, So, science wise, there are two
important factors in making an aspect that's both pretty and tasty.
That the jelling agent and the crystal clear soup stock. First,
let's talk about the stock. Clarifying a cloudy stock into
a translucent consummate is tricky. Some of the particles that
(27:09):
make a stock cloudy are too tiny to effectively sift
out with strainers or cheese cloth um although that is
certainly your first step. But as Maestro Martino wrote in
the fifteen hundreds, you can harness the power of electromagnetics
to clarify your stock. Well, he didn't quite say that.
He said that you should beat egg whites and add
them to simmering stock, but but ultimately it's what he meant.
(27:32):
Egg whites, as it turns out, contain a protein called
album in, which are positively charged molecules. Lots of the
stuff floating in your stock is negatively charged. Positives and
negatives attract, so all of that stuff sticks to the
album and particles in the egg whites. After a while,
a sort of raft of detritus forms, and you can
(27:54):
just skim it off, leaving a much clearer soup. You
can also use gelatin or other products that work in
a similar electromagnetic way to achieve a clear consumme a
and the The technique has also been used in wine
making since the sixteen hundreds. At least, it created such
a surplus of egg yolks in Bordeaux that it started
a specially a specialty pastry trade there. And we will
(28:15):
have to come back to this later because it's great, absolutely,
okay um. There's a lot of discussion, by the way,
among chefs about how to create the most flavorful yet
the most transparent consumme A way too much to go
into here. Those are the basics now. That jelling agent,
as we talked about in our marshmallow episode, gelatine is
a really useful thing in food chemistry because it solidifies
(28:39):
and around degrees fahrenheit a k a thirty five degrees celsius,
and it melts at anything above that, which is why
things like jello melt in your mouth, thus delivering flavor
directly to your tongue. Uh. Gelatine is a protein, and
it's made up of these long friendly chains with amino
acids by friendly, I mean that they're super willing to
(28:59):
bond end up into complex and matrices at room temperature,
and they are also happy to form bonds with water molecules.
Gelatine chains can have hundreds of hydrogen atoms sticking out
along their sides, each of which can bond weakly with
a water molecule when the temperature is cool enough. So
what happens is you add gelatine to warm water, and
the warmth makes all the gelatine molecules slip and slide
(29:21):
and wiggle apart from each other. As they cool, they
chill out literally and they grab up some water molecules
and they cling together in these complex patterns, trapping the
water among themselves jello mold. If you warm it up again,
say in your mouth, all of those molecules starts sliding
away from each other again. Gelatine itself is flavorless, but
(29:42):
anything soluble in water of flavorings and colorings will come
along for the ride. H m hm. You get in
gelatine by breaking down collagen, which is even longer chains
with amino acids. They're all twined up together. Collagen is
a connective protein in and around cells that that gives
(30:02):
them a flexible structure. It makes up about thirty percent
of your body weight, actually, and it's especially prevalent in
skin and tendons and bones, which is why feet are
so effective in making these gelatine stocks, because they they've
got all these tendons and lots of surface area of
the bones and the skin, so you've got plenty of
opportunity to leach the collagen's out. So when you boil
(30:23):
these tissues, the collagen inside them untwined, leaving you with
gelatin molecules. And what's happening when you cool the gelatine
down is the molecules are sort of trying to to
reform those twiny collagen patterns and sort of failing, but
failing deliciously best way to fail. These days, many chefs
might prepare their aspects with packaged gelatine or with vegetarian
(30:46):
alternatives like a seaweed extracts, but purists will tell you
that you really do need to boil some animal feet
and gelatine may carry health benefits. When gelatine supplements are
taken with vitamin C. They've sometimes been shown to prove
patients blood blood levels of the markers of collagen synthesis
to help like repair bones and keep your teeth and
(31:07):
skin healthy. Stuff like that. Share um and gelatine is
certainly source of protein, but mostly you should eat it
if you like it. Yeah, um, I have to say
I've got a newfound respect for Gentlaton. Now there's a
lot of very interesting science right there. Right, So, in
case we haven't convinced you that you need to look
(31:29):
up some pictures of these things, here are some of
the best aspect titles we stumbled upon. And I think
the titles enough will be enough to pique your curiosity,
I hope. So okay, all right, A lot of them
sound like modern art pieces to me. So there's a
lime cheese salad, tuna and jello pie, super salad loaf
(31:52):
ar recipe courtesy of Hellman's Mayo that's involved stuffing an
empty bologny shell with the jelly of mash peas and
keeping with mayo. And also you've got bonus points for
adding radish roses. Radish roses were everywhere in these things
along those lines. Molded mayonnaise salad, mostly cheese and mayo,
(32:13):
snowy chicken confetti salad, Emerald cantlepe jellied lamb salad, sauerkraut,
mold run and stuffed roast, pork bean and mushroom salad,
lemony salmon tower pressed ox tongue. So that'll I mean,
(32:35):
surely you're hungry by now, surely you've got to be
absolutely Oh well, that that just about brings us to
our listener mail. Yes, our first letter is in response
to our Chuck E Cheese episode. Katie sentaz in On Halloween,
(32:56):
I attended my friend's mom's wedding at a Chuck E Cheese.
We all dressed up and an Elvis impersonator was in
charge of the wedding service. The bride and groom even
went into the ticket window tunnel to grab tickets together.
It was quite possibly the weirdest wedding that I've been to.
During your latest episode, I had flashbacks at that time,
and I thought you two would enjoy reading about it.
(33:18):
Attached as a group picture from the event, I hope
you all in the studio. I have a wonderful week.
The picture was lovely. I think that would be a
fun wedding to attend personally, it would be strange and
very memorable. Oh yeah, yes, memorable is great. Come on,
you want to be original. Also about our check e
Cheese episode, Lisa wrote when our daughters were younger, around
(33:40):
four and six years old, the show they watched on
PBS was sponsored by check E Cheese. They would often
ask to go, but it never had any appeal to
my husband or me. One snowy Michigan spring Sunday afternoon,
my husband found a coupon to the check E Cheese
about forty five minutes away. As a surprise, we took
our girls from pizza and games. They had a blast.
On the way home. They asked when we could go
(34:03):
back out of nowhere self preservation, I assume. I told
them that unfortunately, to give all the children a turn.
Every child in the world is only allowed one visit
to chuck E Cheese. We should be happy we finally
had our turn and cherish the fun we had. They
completely bought this story and didn't call me out on
it until a couple of years ago. There now ten
(34:23):
and twelve. That's magical, Yes, I believe, she said, parenting
wind smiley face after that, that's yeah, that's wonderful. And
I have to say thank you to all the listeners
who have been sending us, um the Chuck E Cheese
YouTube videos with like pop and rap music and performing
(34:48):
right right that people have set up in their own
homes I think, uh, and and just set it to
write to set the machinery to play along to amazing
hip hop in the club by Ushure. Yeah, very enjoyable
and bizarre. I've retweeted at least one of those. It's
(35:08):
it's not like I, like I said on Twitter, y'all,
like it's not necessarily not safe for work, but it's
a little bit like not safe for sanity or humanity. Yeah.
Who It's a bunch but I but I recommend checking
it out if you if you think that you would
even be a little bit interested in that, absolutely, and
if you would like to do as these listeners have
(35:29):
done and write to us, you can. We have an
email address. It's food Stuff at how stuff works dot com.
We are also on Facebook and Twitter at food stuff
hs W and on Instagram at food Stuff. Shout out
to our sound engineer, Alexander Williams. I've got his name right.
That's excellent. Uh. We hope to hear from you, and
we hope that lots more good things I come in
(35:50):
your way.
Hello, and welcome to food Stuff. I'm Anny Rees and
I'm Lauren Folgelbaum, and today we're talking about aspects. You
might remember we mentioned this in a listener mail that
we read a couple episodes ago from Sierra. Thank you Sierra,
because it was such a wonderful discovery for me. I've
never heard of these things. I laughed so hard. I
(00:32):
was horrified. Growing growing up watching a lot of Julia
Child videos. Um, I I had definitely been exposed to that,
and also my my dad had had a little bit
of training in classical French cooking. So if you haven't
seen a picture of one of these things, look them
up the literal second you get a chance, like the second.
They're so strange and they're so funny. Because okay, because
(00:52):
what what is an aspect? Yes, it's basically savory jellouh
before you freak out, Okay, have you ever enjoyed us
a say tan katsu raman or like a nice rich
stock or like a bone broth kind of thing? Uh,
savory gelatin a k A aspect is a chilled version
of the same thing. Uh. You take broth or stock
(01:15):
or consummate, which is another term for clarified stock, and
you jellify it, chill it, and mold it into decorative shapes,
sometimes with meat or vegetables or hard boiled eggs or
whatever else you can imagine put inside of it. I
am trying to hold back from laughing just hearing the description. Okay,
but like ideally, the point of an aspect is is
(01:35):
that you know it phase changes at your body temperature
a k a. Melts, so you wind up with this
spoonful of cold, delicious broth on your tongue. Mm hmm.
They look ludicrous. They look absolutely just gross and very
silly and wiggly and meaty, very meaty and vegetably olive.
(01:59):
You sometimes, yeah, I mean now you have to look
them up if you haven't done it already. And every
every gelatine mold that you can imagine has had an
aspect in it at some point, definitely probably something you
can't imagine. There were definitely some things I never would
have imagined that I stumbled in aspect jelly or delay.
(02:21):
If your fancy can also be used as a kind
of decoration or like condiment for cold dishes. Um it
can be like a flavorful, pretty topping that you put
on top of a pettet's or tureens. Or you can
use it as a thin like brushed on glaze on
cold presentations of sliced meat or seafood to give them
that nice sheen. Oh yes, you want all your food
(02:42):
to be shiny, obviously. Uh. Sometimes the jelly part is
basically inedible or at least very unpleasant um, and is
simply in heavy scare quotes, a way to show off
the time and money that you have at your disposal. Uh,
Like like putting it a whole cooked salmon inside a
(03:03):
purely decorative aspect mold. Don't we all love having to
dig through basically an inedible jelly to get to a
whole cooked salmon. That's what I do at all of
my fancy parties. Annie. This is why I've never invited you.
I didn't think you could handle it. I promised to
be less judgmental. But you have to invite me to
(03:24):
one of these. Now now that I know about it,
I have to go, I guess so. In the middle
of our research for this. By the way, um, a
blogger slash YouTuber by the name of Emmy as an
Emmy made in Japan had a post about spaghetti jello
go viral as I have been told what the kids
say these days, they I guess, um, Uh, spaghetti jello
(03:46):
is like a savory tomato based jello mold with spaghettios
in it. Um the way that she's made it anyway, Um,
you might have seen this video and it is it
basically counts as an aspect. Yeah, it does. Um. I
did have a friend whose mom she was notorious for
her interesting cooking, we'll say, And one time I came
(04:08):
over and she said she had orange jello with cabbage. Huh.
I didn't try it. I didn't see it because of
those words enough as a kid, I was like, no, no,
But I guess maybe that was an aspect. Maybe she
was offering me some form of an aspect. It might
have counted. I certainly growing up, my um my grandmother
(04:29):
in Ohio would serve gelatins salads, um, which would be
like lime jello with maybe shredded carrots or something like
that inside of it. And it was definitely a side
salad and it was definitely like sweet jello with carrots
in it. I love that people call them salads. It's
one of my favorite things. We'll do anything to like
(04:50):
sound healthy, but really, yeah, I mean it, it's green.
Oh boy, yep, that's what counts these day. And we
laugh or maybe shutter at these now, but at one
time they were reserved for the finest of the fine
dining experience. Absolutely. Yeah. So let's look at the history
(05:11):
of these things. Aspects are relatively new, new kid on
the block, but they might be older than you think.
The first instances of aspects most likely go back to
eighteenth century France. Yes, France, Like we're kind of mentioned
in the beginning of the podcast, so yeah, yeah, that's
spoiler alerts. Sorry, she totally spoiled it. The first instance
(05:35):
of gelatine making didn't involve food at all. Instead, scraps
and bones left over after an animal carcass had been
picked clean would be boiled down to collagen that was
then used as an adhesive for cave painting. Yeah. Good
old Pliny mentions that Romans did a similar thing to
produce strong fish glue. Yeah. Gelatine useful for many things.
(05:56):
We'll get into some of that into science section later on.
Aspects were preceded by fourteenth century medieval Savory gelatin dishes
called jellies that were made with boiled pig feet and
ears filtered through cough. I found one recipe by the
name of a jelly of flesh that sounds so good,
(06:16):
sounds so metal it does it could be a band.
The molded shapes delighted the medieval ive. They added bonus
that the meats and produced inside the gelatine usually could
prevent spoilage for a little longer by cutting off the
air supply from oxygen hungry bacteria. Right. Uh. The word
jelly or gelatine may come, by the way, from the
(06:38):
Latin gelata, meaning frozen, indicating that the liquid and anything
that you put in it would be frozen in place.
Also gelato. Yeah. Sure. Recipes for other savory gelatin dishes
use calves and sheep's feet instead of pigs. One calls
for white wine, ginger, annis, cinnamon, pepper, nutmeg, mace, and
(06:59):
saffron in the mix. Uh, and and all that would
then be strained and poured over chopped hens and the
meat from the cow and or sheep's feet. So fancy
sounds delightful, and making these dishes was just a serious
pain in the in the calf's foot, you'd have to
boil the animal parts for several hours, then strain all
(07:21):
of the solids out and let the remaining liquid settle
for an entire day and night, so that the fat
would rise to the top for skin for skimming. Um
that the remaining stuff was gelatine that could be reheated
and then flavored and molded. There was also a specific
dish I found called um galantine a galantine. No, No,
(07:43):
it's spelled like Galantine's day, but I think it's pronounced Galantine.
And it was made of a minced meat and other
stuff that was pressed into sort of like a round
loaf and then coated in the savory gelatine with a
heavy spice blend. It was popular enough that Chaucer mentions
it in his slid to rosamond Um. We got our
compatriot Jonathan Strickland, who is an erstwhile student of Middle English,
(08:06):
to read the original for us. Nos, never peak wallowed
in garlandin as e in LoVa, I'm wallowed on. In
case you didn't catch all of that, it means something like, uh,
never was Pike so imbued in Gallantine as I in
love am imbued and wounded. Wow, that's some serious stuff.
(08:32):
Chaucer was so thirsty. Oh my goodness. Okay. Uh. If
you want to hear more from from Jonathan Strickland, by
the way, you can catch him on the podcast tech
Stuff and also on the Facebook live show called Game
Changers on How Stuff Works Facebook page. Yeah, super fun people,
history of board games, people playboard games, video games, all
kinds of things. Yeah, check them out, Thank you Jonathan. Anyway,
(08:55):
uh so, these sorts of recipes pop up in upper
class cookbooks from all over Europe. The British Museum Cookbook
reports they were often decorated with edible gold and silver
leaf to make them that much more extra showy. Yes. Uh.
And these cold dishes might have been especially popular due
to the theory of using food to balance humors. That
(09:18):
that whole concept of cool versus hot, and wet versus
dry that's going on in our bodies and in the
universe around us. Um so, so, cold dishes made with
gelatine were recommended, especially for people with hot and moist temperaments,
um like youth and adolescence or during towards southern summers.
(09:39):
One of these days, we're going to do an episode
on humors. I feel like they keep popping up. Yeah,
and I'm not entirely sure, but I am interested in
hot and moist temperaments. That's a great descriptor. I think
I've known a few people like that, Oh have you?
I think we all do anyway to please the Friday
(09:59):
non eating Catholic crowd. Chef's got the idea to boil
some eels in the stock of a fish like cod,
and also swim bladders to make Catholic approved fish jellies.
That sounds very appetizing. Oh yeah. Meanwhile, in the late
fifteen hundreds, a fellow sometimes called Europe's first celebrity chef,
(10:20):
wrote about his technique of using egg whites to help
clarify stock for gelatine. That was Maestro Martino di como Um,
who was Italian if you could not tell, And we'll
talk more about that works also in our science section below.
Towards the end of the medieval era, the definition of
jelly expanded to include sweets, some made with either pecton
(10:42):
or The Russian discovered eyes and glass, which was derived
from beluga bladder surgeons. That doesn't sound as fancy as
eyes and glass, absolutely not. Rose water was a popular
flavoring for these sweet jellies. And this was also about
the time that the terram flummery came into existence, which
is usually reserved for for sweet gelled dishes, but has
(11:05):
sometimes been used to hold at savory ingredients as well.
Flummery sounds like something you'd exclaim, flambert, what flubbery? Is
this that the meaning of the word has has expanded
to mean something kind of like insubstantial and silly excellent?
I might incorporate that absolutely. Apart from the Lord of
(11:26):
the rings, sounding eyes and glass, there were a few
other competitors of gelatine. In sixteen sixty Japan, it was
discovered that if you processed red seaweed you could get content,
a seaweed based jelly that was especially popular in Asia.
Europeans called it a garagar, and Northern Europe also had
a method for boiling irish moss or red seaweed until
(11:48):
they derived kara guinan. I've actually never known how to
say that, which they then used to thicken things up.
Other sources of jellification included heart's horn, which is made
from the horns of deer um and ivory shavings very
very fancy. Indeed, Indeed, it wasn't until sixteen eighty two,
(12:09):
that gelatine technology took another leap with French mathematician Dennis
Papen's invention of the wonderfully named steam digester. Steam digester,
this thing extracted gelatine after some serious animal bone boiling.
The first industrial galatin extracting didn't happen until eighteen eighteen. Wow.
Seventeen eighty nine marks the first time the word appeared
(12:31):
written in English aspect yes, yes, and at the time
it meant a cold dish of meat, fish, eggs, et cetera,
set in molded jelly. The English got it from the French,
but beyond that, the origins are kind of a mystery. Yeah,
aspect was also a French term at the time for
a type of lavenders, so maybe it got the name
from lavender seasoning that was used in recipes. But some
(12:55):
food historians and entomologists trace it to the Greek word aspis,
which literally meant around shield but had become a name
for snakes, especially ones with rounded hoods, and that's where
we get the word asp from. The shield part would
certainly make sense in terms of protecting food inside the jelly,
or the snake part might refer to the bright colors
(13:15):
that are that are used that we're used in in
these uh, these aspects, you know, colored with stuff like
extracts of sandal wood for red, saffron for yellow, and
boiled blood for black. And William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair,
one of the characters, Spoilers, died an aspect of plover's eggs.
(13:38):
Does that sound good? The famous French dictionary Lee Trey
from around that time lists as cold as an aspect
as a proverbial phrase. Speaking of proverbs, The Brits apparently
used one to this day that is set in aspect,
which means something that's stubbornly jilled in its outdated ways. Yes,
(14:00):
and this was used in a recent headline about British politics.
So so it's great, Yeah, still in use. Love it.
There was an amazing variety of fanciful aspects described in
a cookbook from seventeen sixty nine called The Experienced English
Housekeeper by one Elizabeth Raffled. And she laid out just
(14:22):
these spectacular jellies that were made with calf's footstock clarified
with egg whites. Picture if you will, whole pigeons roasted
with sprigs of myrtle stuck in their beaks, encased in
clear gelatine, or a gelatine fish pond made with a
large and small colored flummery fishes also encased in clear gelatine,
(14:43):
or a hen's nest made out of shredded lemon peel
set in gelatine, filled with gelatin eggs molded in real eggshells,
or with molded gelatine chickens. I I want to hang
out with this lady. She sounds fabulous, so fabulous. But
Aspects Heyday had not yet arrived, and soon they would
be propelled into culinary fame by one extra famous chef.
(15:07):
But before we get to that, let's take a quick
break for a word from our sponsor, and we're back.
Thank you, sponsor. The person we have to thank for
bringing Aspects into the limelight Lime Lights. It's a major foreshadowing.
(15:31):
Pun was the famous nineteenth century chef Antonin Karrem who
we talked about for a decent bit during our French
Cuisine episode. He is also known as one of the
first celebrity chefs. He adored these things and to do
it right, in his mind, you needed a calf's foot.
(15:52):
And that's because, as we said before you had to
boil it down clarify it said it because of the
time involved asked were extremely expensive and almost exclusively by
the rich, acting as centerpieces on tables that overfloweth with
the core of food and drink. It was assumed that
if you presented an aspect in such a manner, you
(16:14):
must have a weight staff who did all the work
for you. And in Korem's terminology he called this chauffeur
are cooked hot, served cold. Yes. And like we mentioned
in our French food episode, Korem was a chef under Napoleon,
so that aspects he perfected were towering, multilayered structures to behold,
(16:34):
sometimes composing tableau. His final cookbook, published posthumously, featured an
entire chapter complete with diagrams. Diagrams on the mighty extremely
customizable aspect. Yeah, just these these ribboned layers of different colors,
and they looked like castles, and they had these turrets
(16:54):
and it was huh, it was a lot. Yes, they're
pretty great. Looks them up. The European Association of Luxury
and Aspect made the journey across to the American colonies,
where they were popular with rich Southern plantation owners and
where they were probably made by slaves and rich elite
in New York. And you wouldn't believe who's popping up
(17:16):
again but Thomas Jefferson. Of course, he combined French wine
and the French aspect to offer guests at Bunicello wine jellies.
That sounds pretty lovely. The industrial evolution brought the aspect
to a wider audience with the invention of package to gelatine. Yes,
(17:37):
New York glue manufacturer Peter Cooper patented a powdered mix
of processed sugar, spices, eggs, and lemon. He called the
first dessert gelatine mix. However, and the words of Jello
Gallery dot Org, it didn't really jell with the American
publish They beat us to that one. They did. It was, however, expensive,
(18:00):
being that it was a byproduct of the meat industry,
which gave enterprising folks the motivation to work with it.
And meanwhile, aspect based dishes never really went out of
fashion in most of Europe. Of Victorians, for example, were
mad about complex gelled dishes like a Foi gras set
in bombshell gelatine molds decorated with ringlets, stamped out of
(18:21):
egg set on beds of more gelatin, and also artichokes.
Part of the draw of these things is that they
could be prepared a day ahead, leaving the day of
the party for other business. Oh man, they sounds so epic.
A couple of years later and Pearl we Weight, who
made cough syrups, added food coloring to the mix of
(18:44):
like dry gelatine powder to create a product. His wife
suggested he call jellou Yes that Jello, which he patented
that year, but two years later he sold it to
Genesee Food Company for four and fifty dollars, which is
around about eleven thousand of today's American dollars, which I
guess isn't super shabby unless you consider the empire that
(19:07):
Jello is. By nine hundred, Genese Food Company was putting
out pamphlets and short cookbooks complete with Jello recipes to
increase demand. They weren't the only ones promoting Jello in
the early nineteen hundreds either. Companies that manufactured chillers or
refrigerators got in the game too. For instance, General Electric
came out with a cookbook to help you get the
(19:28):
most out of your new refrigerator. If you take a
look at the salad section. Yes, the salad section, a
majority of them are aspects. And these ad campaigns were
very successful. Jello and the aspect really took off in
the United States. Housewives like them because they were quick, cheap.
The dessert ones even saved you sugar, increase the life
(19:48):
of leftovers, and this was really important during the Great Depression.
And yet they somehow managed to keep this sort of
show stopper luxurious reputation in part do the time it
took for the gelatine to set and also they were
the one of the least messy things you could feed
you kids. Oh along those lines, there's a there's a
(20:08):
book called Perfection Salad written by food historian Laura Shapiro
about women in cooking around the turn of the twentieth century,
and she writes that this concept of the cleanliness of
food literally and psychologically was just a major motivator at
the time, which we've previously discussed in various episodes about
the rise of a clean eating culture promoted by people
(20:29):
like A. Graham and Kellogg, you know, the pure food craze.
Shapiro wrote of the gelatine salad a salad at lasting
control of itself. At Last, at Last, Jello did a
good job of capitalizing on the nineteen o six Food
and Drug Act, advertising it's safety pouch and using the
(20:49):
word pure three times. This act was prompted by Upton
Sinclair's The Jungle, which is that infamous look into the
realities of the meat industry. It's a rough one, but
definitely worth reading. In jello debut, the smash hit Jello
Girl that hailed the product as all that was pure
and innocent about childhood sugar. And thus Jello was ration
(21:13):
during World War One, which put a damp errou on things,
but the product came back swinging once the war was over,
helped along by the Great Depression and new flavor lime Jello. Apparently,
the flavor was so loved entire cookbooks were devoted to it.
Another development that helped gelatin salads popularity that popularization of
(21:35):
the electric refrigerator. By the end of the nineteen thirties,
about sixty percent of households in America had one um,
and they kept food cooler more consistently. The Oxford Encyclopedia
of Food and Drink in America estimates it up to
a third of all recipes printing cookbooks at the time
involved gelatine. That's crazy, A jello wasn't the only gelatine
(21:55):
in the game. Charles Knox of Knox Unflavored Gelatine touted
his reduct at the nineteen o four World's Fair. A
year later, The Perfection Salad The Resty Not the book
made its debut at a Knox sponsored cooking contest in Pennsylvania.
This aspect consisted of finally shopped cabbage, celery, and red pepper.
(22:17):
It one third place, and in nineteen seventy two, James
Beard wrote that this aspects triumph unleashed a demand for
congealed salads that has grown alarmingly, particularly in the suburbs.
These salads, it still feels weird to call them. That.
We're perceived as a lady food, so light and delicate. Huh.
(22:38):
The title of knox Yales and cookbook was Dainty Desserts
for Dainty People. Oh, man, I don't think that's a
book marketed to us. Anny, No, I don't think so.
And yet they still held on to their higher status
when during World War Two, serving an aspect was kind
of like saying to your friends you could throw quite
the dinner party or gathering rations are no rations. And
(23:01):
there was also an interesting social transition happening regarding the
role of a good housewife. Um A NIFT survey asked
women to report their thoughts on a housewife who brought
instant coffee versus one who brewed coffee. The women did
not go easy on the housewife who purchased the instant coffee,
(23:22):
calling her lazy, disorganized, and a bad wife. Ouch yeah.
At the same time, the time and cost efficiency of
making instant and manufactured products, along with the rate of
profits seen by the producers of these things during during
World War Two, meant that they weren't going anywhere. A
housewife needed to be efficient and thrifty, but also put
(23:45):
time and effort into the meals she cooked, as it
was seen as her role. If you just put jello
in a bowl, it wasn't beaut as cooking. So what
do you do. Let's make this fancy looking aspect cheaply
and efficiently and hit all the checkboxes. The aesthetic was key,
and this was done with other cheap processed foods as well.
(24:06):
Think hot dogs being used to make pigs and blanket
for example. At their height, there were all kinds of
crazy recipes like lime jello with canned tuna, and man
the terminology and the cookbooks words like sinkers and floaters. Yeah,
painting quite the image there to make the gelatine less
(24:28):
see through you at mayo or cream. And until the
nineteen seventies you could buy savory jello flavors like celery
and Italian salad. This is not a thing that I knew,
and I'm horrified, but kind of intrigued, very very intrigued. Oh,
I wondered. I'm sure that you could reproduce this with
(24:49):
some unflavored gelatine in your own seasonings at home. I'm
sure that's worth an experiment for sure. And speaking of
the nineteen seventies, that's about the time the Aspect bubble burst. Yep,
what happened, you ask? Changing views on dieting and nutrition
happened For the last several years of their reign. Aspects
started skiing more and more towards dessert, and then there
(25:11):
was this damaging suns tried tomato fad. Yeah, I can't
put a dried thing in a wet thing. Sure, if
that doesn't make sense. No, women started working easier than gelatine,
microwave friendly meals hit the shelves. It pretty much died
out save for parts of the Midwest and South. One
of my favorite descriptions I came across when researching this
(25:32):
called the aspect a culinary fossil and a ghost. I know, oh,
I know several chefs who would who are offended. They
would disagree strong. Obviously, jello is still around. They retooled
after the aspects demise, quote unquote, marketing themselves as a
snack our dessert option. I believe they called themselves the
(25:54):
number one best selling dessert in the world. I'll have
to look into that more, but I'm pretty sure there
is one state where aspects of the savory variety remained
very popular. It's all especially among the Mormon population. The
state named it their state snack in two thousand one,
and the region is sometimes called the Jello Belt. An
(26:16):
aspect like things have stuck around in Asian American cuisine,
as a dumpling filling, for example. Absolutely. So that's kind
of a round up of this weird and wild history
of aspects until now. Yeah, and now we've got some
of the science behind aspects for you. But first we've
got another quick word from our sponsor, and we're back,
(26:46):
Thank you sponsor. Okay, So, science wise, there are two
important factors in making an aspect that's both pretty and tasty.
That the jelling agent and the crystal clear soup stock. First,
let's talk about the stock. Clarifying a cloudy stock into
a translucent consummate is tricky. Some of the particles that
(27:09):
make a stock cloudy are too tiny to effectively sift
out with strainers or cheese cloth um although that is
certainly your first step. But as Maestro Martino wrote in
the fifteen hundreds, you can harness the power of electromagnetics
to clarify your stock. Well, he didn't quite say that.
He said that you should beat egg whites and add
them to simmering stock, but but ultimately it's what he meant.
(27:32):
Egg whites, as it turns out, contain a protein called
album in, which are positively charged molecules. Lots of the
stuff floating in your stock is negatively charged. Positives and
negatives attract, so all of that stuff sticks to the
album and particles in the egg whites. After a while,
a sort of raft of detritus forms, and you can
(27:54):
just skim it off, leaving a much clearer soup. You
can also use gelatin or other products that work in
a similar electromagnetic way to achieve a clear consumme a
and the The technique has also been used in wine
making since the sixteen hundreds. At least, it created such
a surplus of egg yolks in Bordeaux that it started
a specially a specialty pastry trade there. And we will
(28:15):
have to come back to this later because it's great, absolutely,
okay um. There's a lot of discussion, by the way,
among chefs about how to create the most flavorful yet
the most transparent consumme A way too much to go
into here. Those are the basics now. That jelling agent,
as we talked about in our marshmallow episode, gelatine is
a really useful thing in food chemistry because it solidifies
(28:39):
and around degrees fahrenheit a k a thirty five degrees celsius,
and it melts at anything above that, which is why
things like jello melt in your mouth, thus delivering flavor
directly to your tongue. Uh. Gelatine is a protein, and
it's made up of these long friendly chains with amino
acids by friendly, I mean that they're super willing to
(28:59):
bond end up into complex and matrices at room temperature,
and they are also happy to form bonds with water molecules.
Gelatine chains can have hundreds of hydrogen atoms sticking out
along their sides, each of which can bond weakly with
a water molecule when the temperature is cool enough. So
what happens is you add gelatine to warm water, and
the warmth makes all the gelatine molecules slip and slide
(29:21):
and wiggle apart from each other. As they cool, they
chill out literally and they grab up some water molecules
and they cling together in these complex patterns, trapping the
water among themselves jello mold. If you warm it up again,
say in your mouth, all of those molecules starts sliding
away from each other again. Gelatine itself is flavorless, but
(29:42):
anything soluble in water of flavorings and colorings will come
along for the ride. H m hm. You get in
gelatine by breaking down collagen, which is even longer chains
with amino acids. They're all twined up together. Collagen is
a connective protein in and around cells that that gives
(30:02):
them a flexible structure. It makes up about thirty percent
of your body weight, actually, and it's especially prevalent in
skin and tendons and bones, which is why feet are
so effective in making these gelatine stocks, because they they've
got all these tendons and lots of surface area of
the bones and the skin, so you've got plenty of
opportunity to leach the collagen's out. So when you boil
(30:23):
these tissues, the collagen inside them untwined, leaving you with
gelatin molecules. And what's happening when you cool the gelatine
down is the molecules are sort of trying to to
reform those twiny collagen patterns and sort of failing, but
failing deliciously best way to fail. These days, many chefs
might prepare their aspects with packaged gelatine or with vegetarian
(30:46):
alternatives like a seaweed extracts, but purists will tell you
that you really do need to boil some animal feet
and gelatine may carry health benefits. When gelatine supplements are
taken with vitamin C. They've sometimes been shown to prove
patients blood blood levels of the markers of collagen synthesis
to help like repair bones and keep your teeth and
(31:07):
skin healthy. Stuff like that. Share um and gelatine is
certainly source of protein, but mostly you should eat it
if you like it. Yeah, um, I have to say
I've got a newfound respect for Gentlaton. Now there's a
lot of very interesting science right there. Right, So, in
case we haven't convinced you that you need to look
(31:29):
up some pictures of these things, here are some of
the best aspect titles we stumbled upon. And I think
the titles enough will be enough to pique your curiosity,
I hope. So okay, all right, A lot of them
sound like modern art pieces to me. So there's a
lime cheese salad, tuna and jello pie, super salad loaf
(31:52):
ar recipe courtesy of Hellman's Mayo that's involved stuffing an
empty bologny shell with the jelly of mash peas and
keeping with mayo. And also you've got bonus points for
adding radish roses. Radish roses were everywhere in these things
along those lines. Molded mayonnaise salad, mostly cheese and mayo,
(32:13):
snowy chicken confetti salad, Emerald cantlepe jellied lamb salad, sauerkraut,
mold run and stuffed roast, pork bean and mushroom salad,
lemony salmon tower pressed ox tongue. So that'll I mean,
(32:35):
surely you're hungry by now, surely you've got to be
absolutely Oh well, that that just about brings us to
our listener mail. Yes, our first letter is in response
to our Chuck E Cheese episode. Katie sentaz in On Halloween,
(32:56):
I attended my friend's mom's wedding at a Chuck E Cheese.
We all dressed up and an Elvis impersonator was in
charge of the wedding service. The bride and groom even
went into the ticket window tunnel to grab tickets together.
It was quite possibly the weirdest wedding that I've been to.
During your latest episode, I had flashbacks at that time,
and I thought you two would enjoy reading about it.
(33:18):
Attached as a group picture from the event, I hope
you all in the studio. I have a wonderful week.
The picture was lovely. I think that would be a
fun wedding to attend personally, it would be strange and
very memorable. Oh yeah, yes, memorable is great. Come on,
you want to be original. Also about our check e
Cheese episode, Lisa wrote when our daughters were younger, around
(33:40):
four and six years old, the show they watched on
PBS was sponsored by check E Cheese. They would often
ask to go, but it never had any appeal to
my husband or me. One snowy Michigan spring Sunday afternoon,
my husband found a coupon to the check E Cheese
about forty five minutes away. As a surprise, we took
our girls from pizza and games. They had a blast.
On the way home. They asked when we could go
(34:03):
back out of nowhere self preservation, I assume. I told
them that unfortunately, to give all the children a turn.
Every child in the world is only allowed one visit
to chuck E Cheese. We should be happy we finally
had our turn and cherish the fun we had. They
completely bought this story and didn't call me out on
it until a couple of years ago. There now ten
(34:23):
and twelve. That's magical, Yes, I believe, she said, parenting
wind smiley face after that, that's yeah, that's wonderful. And
I have to say thank you to all the listeners
who have been sending us, um the Chuck E Cheese
YouTube videos with like pop and rap music and performing
(34:48):
right right that people have set up in their own
homes I think, uh, and and just set it to
write to set the machinery to play along to amazing
hip hop in the club by Ushure. Yeah, very enjoyable
and bizarre. I've retweeted at least one of those. It's
(35:08):
it's not like I, like I said on Twitter, y'all,
like it's not necessarily not safe for work, but it's
a little bit like not safe for sanity or humanity. Yeah.
Who It's a bunch but I but I recommend checking
it out if you if you think that you would
even be a little bit interested in that, absolutely, and
if you would like to do as these listeners have
(35:29):
done and write to us, you can. We have an
email address. It's food Stuff at how stuff works dot com.
We are also on Facebook and Twitter at food stuff
hs W and on Instagram at food Stuff. Shout out
to our sound engineer, Alexander Williams. I've got his name right.
That's excellent. Uh. We hope to hear from you, and
we hope that lots more good things I come in
(35:50):
your way.
Savor News
Hosts And Creators
Anney Reese
Lauren Vogelbaum
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