March 20, 2020 • 36 mins
The concept of savory, broth-based gelatin molds may sound strange to the modern palate, but they were posh for centuries. Anney and Lauren dip into the history of humanity's most aspirational aspics, plus the science of gelatin.
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hello, and welcome to favorite production of I Heart Radio.
I'm Annie Reese and I'm Lauren Vocal Bomb, and today
we've got a classic episode for you. It's our episode
on Aspect, which is one of my very favorite discoveries
I've ever made on this show because, as I as
I'll talk about in this episode, I had never heard
(00:27):
of them. I had never seen one. And for people
who are perhaps indoors a lot right now, if you're
looking for a rabbit hole, this is an excellent rabbit hole.
This is probably one of my very favorite rabbit holes
on the entire Internet. Um. If I sound a little
bit strange today, it's because I'm calling in I've got
(00:48):
some mild cold like symptoms. I'm just decided to isolate today.
But um but I was inspired to uh to pull
this out of the archives because of a lovely tweet
from one beat Ball under who U who posted all
like me? All I have in the cupboard is two
tins of tuna fish, an expired box of jello and
egg noodles, cookbook author's ghost calling from hell. Well, well,
(01:12):
well not so high and mighty, now, are we. It's
true I was thinking about because I've never made one
to this day and I've never had one, but I
do have a bunch of gelatin because of that time
my disastrous attempt to make marshmallows. So yeah, yeah, so
maybe it's time. Maybe it's time. Oh man projects projects,
(01:37):
I do. I do love a project. Yeah. Also, yeah,
I I discovered doing my like due diligence research for
for this intro that we completely failed to find a
lovely Facebook group called show Me Your Aspects Once. It
is amazing. Um, I highly recommend going to it right now. Also,
(02:01):
apparently there is at some point in like the four
years that this Facebook group has existed, there was some
kind of schism. There is a break off group that's
called Aspects with Threatening Auras. Oh my gosh. And and
it's a place for and I quote discovering and discussing
(02:21):
aspects that make you feel unsafe while viewing. That is excellent,
excellent and fertile ground. For sure, there are plenty that
feel very unsettling and threatening. Yes, oh gosh. So that's
that's the rest of my day. Honestly, that sounds pretty good.
(02:43):
Sounds pretty good day. But yeah, so I guess we'll
let former Annie and Lauren take it away, Hello, and
welcome to food Stuff. I'm an Eeries and I'm Lauren Vogelbaum,
(03:05):
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 was horrified.
(03:26):
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 what
what is an aspect? Yes, it's basically savory jello. Before
(03:51):
you freak out, Okay, have you ever enjoyed us, say,
say tan katsu raman or like a nice rich stock
or like a bone broth kind of thing. Uh, savory
gelatine a k A aspect is a chilled version of
the same thing. Uh. You take broth or stock or consummate,
which is another term for clarified stock, and you jellify it,
(04:12):
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
that you know it phase changes at your body temperature
a k a. Melts, so you wind up with this
(04:34):
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 huh
all of you sometimes yeah, I mean now you have
(04:55):
to look them up if you haven't done it already.
And every every gelatine mold the you can imagine has
had an aspect in it at some point. Definitely, probably
some you can't imagine. There were definitely some things I
never would have imagined that I stumbled in aspect jelly
or deal a if your fancy can also be used
(05:16):
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 to be shiny, obviously. Uh. Sometimes the jelly
(05:39):
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 purely decorative aspect mold. Don't we all
(06:00):
love having the digs 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've promised to be less judgmental. But you have to
invite me to one of these. Now now that I
know about it, I have to go, I guess so.
(06:22):
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? Do they? I guess? Um? Uh,
spaghetti jello is like a savory tomato based jello mold
(06:42):
with Spaghettio's 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 um interesting cooking, will say. And one time
I came over and she said she had orange jello
(07:04):
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 in Ohio would serve gelatin salads, um,
(07:26):
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 sound healthy, but really, yeah, I mean it,
(07:47):
it's green. Oh boy, yep, that's what counts these days
and we laugh or maybe shut her at these now,
But at one time they were reserved the finest of
the fine dining experience. Absolutely. Yeah. So let's look at
the history of these things. Aspects are relatively new, new
(08:08):
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 Warren kind
of mentioned in the beginning of the podcast. Yeah, yeah,
that's spoiler alert. Sorry, she totally spoiled it. The first
instance of gelatine making didn't involve food at all. Instead,
(08:30):
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.
We'll get into some of that into science section later on.
(08:53):
Aspects were preceded by fourteenth century Medieval Savory gelatine dishes,
called jellies that were aid 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,
sounds so metal it does it could be a band.
(09:13):
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
Latin gelata, meaning frozen, indicating that the liquid and anything
(09:35):
that you put in it would be frozen in place.
Also gelato, Yeah. Sure. Recipes for other savory gelatine dishes
use calves and sheep's feet instead of pigs. One calls
for white wine, ginger, annis, cinnamon, pepper, nutmeg, mace, and
saffron in the mix. Uh. And and all of that
would then be strained and poured over chopped hens and
(09:58):
the meat from the cow door 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
of the solids out, and let the remaining liquid settle
for an entire day and night so that the fat
(10:19):
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 m Gallantine. Oh Galantine, No, No,
it's spelled like Galantine's day, but I think it's pronounced Gallantine.
(10:40):
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 ballad to rosamond Um. We got our
compatriot Jonathan Strickland, who was an erstwhile student of Middle English,
to read the original. Horris nos never peak wallowed in
(11:03):
glandin 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.
(11:25):
Chaser 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 text
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,
(11:47):
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
leief to make them that my 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
(12:11):
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 torrid southern summers.
(12:31):
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
(12:52):
non meat 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
(13:13):
wrote about his technique of using egg whites to help
clarify stock for gelatine. That was Miestro Martino Dick 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
(13:34):
or the Russian discovered eyeinglass, 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 there was also about the time that
the terram flummery came into existence, which is usually reserved
(13:55):
for for sweet gelled dishes, but has sometimes been used
to hold us savory ingredients as well. Flummery sounds like
something you'd exclaim, flambert. What flabbery? Is this? That the
meaning of the word has has expanded to mean something
kind of like insubstantial and silly excellent. I might incorporate
(14:16):
that absolutely. Apart from the Lord of 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
(14:37):
boiling irish moss or red seaweed until 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,
(15:00):
it wasn't until sixteen eighty two 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 gelatin
extracting didn't happen until eighteen eighteen. Wow. Seventeen eighty nine
(15:23):
marks the first time the word appeared 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 lavender, so maybe it got the name
(15:44):
from lavender seasoning that was used in recipes. But some
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
(16:04):
jelly or the snake part might refer to the bright
colors that are that are used that we're used in
in these uh, these aspects, you know, colored with stuff
like extracts of sandalwood for red, saffron for yellow, and
boiled blood for black. And William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair,
one of the characters Spoilers dies an aspect of plover's eggs.
(16:31):
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,
(16:53):
and this was used in a recent headline about British politics.
So so oh it's great, 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
(17:15):
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,
(17:36):
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 extro famous f
(18:00):
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 Light. It's a major foreshadowing.
(18:24):
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.
(18:45):
And that's because, as we said before, you had to
boil it down clarify it said it because of the
time involved. Aspects were extremely expensive and enjoy almost exclusively
by the rich, acting as centerpieces on table that overfloweth
with the core of food and drink. It was assumed
that if he presented an aspect in such a manner,
(19:07):
you 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 the aspects he perfected were towering, multilayered
structures to behold, sometimes composing tableau. His final cookbook, published posthumously,
(19:32):
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 and it was huh, it was a lot. Yes,
they're pretty great. Looked them up. The European Association of
(19:54):
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 he wouldn't believe who's popping
up again, but Thomas Jefferson. Of course, he combined French
wine and the French aspect to offer guests at Monticello
(20:18):
wine jellies. That sounds pretty lovely. The industrial evolution brought
the aspect to a wider audience with the invention of
package to gelatine. Yes, 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, in
(20:41):
the words of Jello gallery dot Org, it didn't really
jell with the American public. They beat us to that one.
They did. It was, however, inexpensive, 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.
(21:04):
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 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,
(21:26):
they sounds so epic. A couple of years later and
Pearl be Weight, who made coughs RUPs, added food coloring
to the mix of like dry gelatine powder to create
a product. His wife suggested he call Jelloh yes, that jello,
which he patented that year, but two years later he
(21:47):
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 jel it is. By nineteen hundred, Genesee Food
Company was putting out pamphlets and short cookbooks complete with
Jello recipes to increase demand. They weren't the only ones
(22:10):
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 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
(22:33):
in the United States. Housewives like them because they were quick, cheap.
The dessert ones even saved you sugar, increase the life
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 due the time it
(22:54):
took for the gelatin to set, and also they were
the one of the least messy things you could feed
you kids. Along those lines, there's a there's a book
called Perfection Salad written by food historian laurash Piro 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
(23:16):
the time, which we've previously discussed in various episodes about
the rise of a clean eating culture promoted by people
like A. Graham and Kellogg. You know, the pure food craze,
Shapiro wrote of the gelatine salad, a salad at last
in control of itself. At Last, at last, Jello did
a good job of capitalizing on the nineteen o six
(23:37):
Food and Drug Act, advertising it's safety pouch and using
the 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. Jello debut the smash hit Jello Girl,
(23:58):
that hailed the product as all that was pure and
innocent about childhood sugar. And thus Jello was ration during
World War One, which put a damper 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.
(24:22):
Another development that helped gelatin salads popularity that popularization of
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
(24:43):
involved gelatine. That's crazy. Angelo wasn't the only gelatine in
the game. Charles Knox of Knox Unflavored Gelatine touted his
product at the nineteen o four World's Fair. A year later,
the Perfection Salad the Resipy not the Book, made his
debut at a Knox sponsored cooking contest in Pennsylvania. This
(25:04):
aspect consisted of finally chopped cabbage, celery, and red pepper.
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.
(25:27):
We're perceived as a lady food, so light and delicate.
Uh huh. The title of knox Yaleton 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
(25:47):
of like saying to your friends, you could throw quite
the dinner party or gathering rations are no rations. And
there was also an interesting social transition happening regarding the
role of a good housewife. Um A nineteen fifty survey
asked women to report their thoughts on a housewife who
brought instant coffee versus one who brewed coffee. The women
(26:11):
did not go easy on the housewife who purchased the
instant coffee, 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.
(26:35):
A housewife needed to be efficient and thrifty, but also
put 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
(26:55):
was key, and this was done with other cheap processed
foods as well. 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 can
tuna and man the terminology and the cookbooks words like
sinkers and floaters. Yeah, painting quite the image there. To
(27:20):
make the gelatine less see through, you add mayo or cream,
and until the nineteen seventies you could buy savory jellow
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
(27:41):
could reproduce this with 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 rain Aspects started skiing more and more
(28:02):
towards dessert, and then there was this damaging sundried 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.
(28:22):
One of my favorite descriptions I came across when researching
this called the aspect a culinary fossil and the 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
(28:43):
as a snack our dessert option. I believe they called
themselves the number one best selling dessert in the world.
I have to look into that more, but I'm pretty
sure there is one state where aspects of the savory
variety remained very popular, you're all, especially among the Mormon
popular as The state named it their state snack in
two thousand one, and the region is sometimes called the
(29:05):
Jello Belt. All Right, an 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.
(29:25):
But first we've got another quick word from our sponsor,
and we're back, Thank you sponsor. Okay, so science wise,
there are two important factors in making an aspect that's
(29:46):
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 make a stock cloudy are
too tiny to effectively sift out with strainers or cheese cloth.
(30:07):
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. Egg whites, as it turns out,
contain a protein called album in, which are positively charged molecules.
(30:31):
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 just skim it off, leaving a much clearer soup.
You can also use gelatin or other products that work
(30:52):
in a similar electromagnetic way to achieve a clear consummate.
And the technique has also been used in wine making
since 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 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
(31:14):
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 and around
degrees fahrenheit a k a thirty five degrees celsius, and
(31:36):
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 of amino acids.
By friendly, I mean that they're super willing to bond
up into complex matrices at room temperature, and they are
also happy to form bonds with water molecules. Uh. Elatin
(32:00):
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 gelatin molecules slip and slide and
wiggle apart from each other. As they cool, they chill out, literally,
and they grab up some water molecules and they cling
(32:22):
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 anything soluble
in water of flavorings and colorings will come along for
the ride. H m hm. You get in gelatine by
(32:44):
breaking down collagen, which is even longer chains of amino acids.
They're all twined up together. Collagen is a connective protein
in and around cells that that gives 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
(33:07):
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 these tissues, the collagen inside them untwined,
leaving you with gelatine 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
(33:29):
of failing, but failing deliciously the best way to fail.
These days, many chefs might prepare their aspects with packaged
gelatine or with vegetarian alternatives like 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
(33:52):
shown to improve patients uh blood blood levels. Of the
markers of collagen synthesis to help repair bones and keep
your teeth in skin healthy stuff like that. Sure, 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 Gilaton.
(34:13):
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 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
(34:35):
sound like modern art pieces to me. So there's a
lime cheese salad, tuna and jello pie super salad loaf
ar recipe courtesy of Hellman's Mayo. This involved stuffing an
empty bologny shell with the jelly of mash peas and
heaping with mayo. And also you've got bonus points for
(34:56):
adding radish roses. Radish roses were everywhere in these things. Yeah,
along those lines, molded mayonnaise salad, mostly cheese and mayo,
snowy chicken confetti salad, Emerald cantleope, jellied lamb salad, sauerkraut,
mold run and stuffed roast, pork bean and mushroom salad,
(35:21):
lemony salmon, tower, pressed ox tongue. So that'll I mean,
surely you're hungry by now. Surely you've got to be
absolutely So that brings us to the end of this
classic episode. We're hoping. Yeah, we hope you've enjoyed it
(35:43):
as much as I remember enjoying it the first time.
So good. Oh yeah, yeah, and we were we were
so bitty we didn't even know how to pronounce plenty yet.
It was ago young, so innocent. Um. We hope that
you all are staying safe and healthy and well. And
(36:05):
if you have any pictures of aspects you've made are
stumbled across, send them, please send them, Share them all,
Share them all right now? Yeah, you can email us
at hello at savor pod dot com. We're also on
social media. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and
Instagram at favor pod, and we do hope to hear
(36:26):
from you. Favor It's production of I Heart Radio. For
more podcast from my Heart Radio, you can visit the
iHeart Radio app or Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows. Thank you, as always to our
superproducers Dylan Bacan and Andrew Howard. Thanks to you for listening,
stay say, stay kind, stay well fed, and we hope
that lots more good things are coming your way.
Hello, and welcome to favorite production of I Heart Radio.
I'm Annie Reese and I'm Lauren Vocal Bomb, and today
we've got a classic episode for you. It's our episode
on Aspect, which is one of my very favorite discoveries
I've ever made on this show because, as I as
I'll talk about in this episode, I had never heard
(00:27):
of them. I had never seen one. And for people
who are perhaps indoors a lot right now, if you're
looking for a rabbit hole, this is an excellent rabbit hole.
This is probably one of my very favorite rabbit holes
on the entire Internet. Um. If I sound a little
bit strange today, it's because I'm calling in I've got
(00:48):
some mild cold like symptoms. I'm just decided to isolate today.
But um but I was inspired to uh to pull
this out of the archives because of a lovely tweet
from one beat Ball under who U who posted all
like me? All I have in the cupboard is two
tins of tuna fish, an expired box of jello and
egg noodles, cookbook author's ghost calling from hell. Well, well,
(01:12):
well not so high and mighty, now, are we. It's
true I was thinking about because I've never made one
to this day and I've never had one, but I
do have a bunch of gelatin because of that time
my disastrous attempt to make marshmallows. So yeah, yeah, so
maybe it's time. Maybe it's time. Oh man projects projects,
(01:37):
I do. I do love a project. Yeah. Also, yeah,
I I discovered doing my like due diligence research for
for this intro that we completely failed to find a
lovely Facebook group called show Me Your Aspects Once. It
is amazing. Um, I highly recommend going to it right now. Also,
(02:01):
apparently there is at some point in like the four
years that this Facebook group has existed, there was some
kind of schism. There is a break off group that's
called Aspects with Threatening Auras. Oh my gosh. And and
it's a place for and I quote discovering and discussing
(02:21):
aspects that make you feel unsafe while viewing. That is excellent,
excellent and fertile ground. For sure, there are plenty that
feel very unsettling and threatening. Yes, oh gosh. So that's
that's the rest of my day. Honestly, that sounds pretty good.
(02:43):
Sounds pretty good day. But yeah, so I guess we'll
let former Annie and Lauren take it away, Hello, and
welcome to food Stuff. I'm an Eeries and I'm Lauren Vogelbaum,
(03:05):
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 was horrified.
(03:26):
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 what
what is an aspect? Yes, it's basically savory jello. Before
(03:51):
you freak out, Okay, have you ever enjoyed us, say,
say tan katsu raman or like a nice rich stock
or like a bone broth kind of thing. Uh, savory
gelatine a k A aspect is a chilled version of
the same thing. Uh. You take broth or stock or consummate,
which is another term for clarified stock, and you jellify it,
(04:12):
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
that you know it phase changes at your body temperature
a k a. Melts, so you wind up with this
(04:34):
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 huh
all of you sometimes yeah, I mean now you have
(04:55):
to look them up if you haven't done it already.
And every every gelatine mold the you can imagine has
had an aspect in it at some point. Definitely, probably
some you can't imagine. There were definitely some things I
never would have imagined that I stumbled in aspect jelly
or deal a if your fancy can also be used
(05:16):
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 to be shiny, obviously. Uh. Sometimes the jelly
(05:39):
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 purely decorative aspect mold. Don't we all
(06:00):
love having the digs 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've promised to be less judgmental. But you have to
invite me to one of these. Now now that I
know about it, I have to go, I guess so.
(06:22):
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? Do they? I guess? Um? Uh,
spaghetti jello is like a savory tomato based jello mold
(06:42):
with Spaghettio's 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 um interesting cooking, will say. And one time
I came over and she said she had orange jello
(07:04):
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 in Ohio would serve gelatin salads, um,
(07:26):
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 sound healthy, but really, yeah, I mean it,
(07:47):
it's green. Oh boy, yep, that's what counts these days
and we laugh or maybe shut her at these now,
But at one time they were reserved the finest of
the fine dining experience. Absolutely. Yeah. So let's look at
the history of these things. Aspects are relatively new, new
(08:08):
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 Warren kind
of mentioned in the beginning of the podcast. Yeah, yeah,
that's spoiler alert. Sorry, she totally spoiled it. The first
instance of gelatine making didn't involve food at all. Instead,
(08:30):
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.
We'll get into some of that into science section later on.
(08:53):
Aspects were preceded by fourteenth century Medieval Savory gelatine dishes,
called jellies that were aid 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,
sounds so metal it does it could be a band.
(09:13):
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
Latin gelata, meaning frozen, indicating that the liquid and anything
(09:35):
that you put in it would be frozen in place.
Also gelato, Yeah. Sure. Recipes for other savory gelatine dishes
use calves and sheep's feet instead of pigs. One calls
for white wine, ginger, annis, cinnamon, pepper, nutmeg, mace, and
saffron in the mix. Uh. And and all of that
would then be strained and poured over chopped hens and
(09:58):
the meat from the cow door 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
of the solids out, and let the remaining liquid settle
for an entire day and night so that the fat
(10:19):
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 m Gallantine. Oh Galantine, No, No,
it's spelled like Galantine's day, but I think it's pronounced Gallantine.
(10:40):
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 ballad to rosamond Um. We got our
compatriot Jonathan Strickland, who was an erstwhile student of Middle English,
to read the original. Horris nos never peak wallowed in
(11:03):
glandin 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.
(11:25):
Chaser 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 text
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,
(11:47):
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
leief to make them that my 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
(12:11):
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 torrid southern summers.
(12:31):
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
(12:52):
non meat 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
(13:13):
wrote about his technique of using egg whites to help
clarify stock for gelatine. That was Miestro Martino Dick 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
(13:34):
or the Russian discovered eyeinglass, 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 there was also about the time that
the terram flummery came into existence, which is usually reserved
(13:55):
for for sweet gelled dishes, but has sometimes been used
to hold us savory ingredients as well. Flummery sounds like
something you'd exclaim, flambert. What flabbery? Is this? That the
meaning of the word has has expanded to mean something
kind of like insubstantial and silly excellent. I might incorporate
(14:16):
that absolutely. Apart from the Lord of 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
(14:37):
boiling irish moss or red seaweed until 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,
(15:00):
it wasn't until sixteen eighty two 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 gelatin
extracting didn't happen until eighteen eighteen. Wow. Seventeen eighty nine
(15:23):
marks the first time the word appeared 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 lavender, so maybe it got the name
(15:44):
from lavender seasoning that was used in recipes. But some
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
(16:04):
jelly or the snake part might refer to the bright
colors that are that are used that we're used in
in these uh, these aspects, you know, colored with stuff
like extracts of sandalwood for red, saffron for yellow, and
boiled blood for black. And William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair,
one of the characters Spoilers dies an aspect of plover's eggs.
(16:31):
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,
(16:53):
and this was used in a recent headline about British politics.
So so oh it's great, 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
(17:15):
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,
(17:36):
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 extro famous f
(18:00):
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 Light. It's a major foreshadowing.
(18:24):
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.
(18:45):
And that's because, as we said before, you had to
boil it down clarify it said it because of the
time involved. Aspects were extremely expensive and enjoy almost exclusively
by the rich, acting as centerpieces on table that overfloweth
with the core of food and drink. It was assumed
that if he presented an aspect in such a manner,
(19:07):
you 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 the aspects he perfected were towering, multilayered
structures to behold, sometimes composing tableau. His final cookbook, published posthumously,
(19:32):
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 and it was huh, it was a lot. Yes,
they're pretty great. Looked them up. The European Association of
(19:54):
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 he wouldn't believe who's popping
up again, but Thomas Jefferson. Of course, he combined French
wine and the French aspect to offer guests at Monticello
(20:18):
wine jellies. That sounds pretty lovely. The industrial evolution brought
the aspect to a wider audience with the invention of
package to gelatine. Yes, 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, in
(20:41):
the words of Jello gallery dot Org, it didn't really
jell with the American public. They beat us to that one.
They did. It was, however, inexpensive, 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.
(21:04):
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 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,
(21:26):
they sounds so epic. A couple of years later and
Pearl be Weight, who made coughs RUPs, added food coloring
to the mix of like dry gelatine powder to create
a product. His wife suggested he call Jelloh yes, that jello,
which he patented that year, but two years later he
(21:47):
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 jel it is. By nineteen hundred, Genesee Food
Company was putting out pamphlets and short cookbooks complete with
Jello recipes to increase demand. They weren't the only ones
(22:10):
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 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
(22:33):
in the United States. Housewives like them because they were quick, cheap.
The dessert ones even saved you sugar, increase the life
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 due the time it
(22:54):
took for the gelatin to set, and also they were
the one of the least messy things you could feed
you kids. Along those lines, there's a there's a book
called Perfection Salad written by food historian laurash Piro 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
(23:16):
the time, which we've previously discussed in various episodes about
the rise of a clean eating culture promoted by people
like A. Graham and Kellogg. You know, the pure food craze,
Shapiro wrote of the gelatine salad, a salad at last
in control of itself. At Last, at last, Jello did
a good job of capitalizing on the nineteen o six
(23:37):
Food and Drug Act, advertising it's safety pouch and using
the 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. Jello debut the smash hit Jello Girl,
(23:58):
that hailed the product as all that was pure and
innocent about childhood sugar. And thus Jello was ration during
World War One, which put a damper 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.
(24:22):
Another development that helped gelatin salads popularity that popularization of
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
(24:43):
involved gelatine. That's crazy. Angelo wasn't the only gelatine in
the game. Charles Knox of Knox Unflavored Gelatine touted his
product at the nineteen o four World's Fair. A year later,
the Perfection Salad the Resipy not the Book, made his
debut at a Knox sponsored cooking contest in Pennsylvania. This
(25:04):
aspect consisted of finally chopped cabbage, celery, and red pepper.
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.
(25:27):
We're perceived as a lady food, so light and delicate.
Uh huh. The title of knox Yaleton 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
(25:47):
of like saying to your friends, you could throw quite
the dinner party or gathering rations are no rations. And
there was also an interesting social transition happening regarding the
role of a good housewife. Um A nineteen fifty survey
asked women to report their thoughts on a housewife who
brought instant coffee versus one who brewed coffee. The women
(26:11):
did not go easy on the housewife who purchased the
instant coffee, 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.
(26:35):
A housewife needed to be efficient and thrifty, but also
put 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
(26:55):
was key, and this was done with other cheap processed
foods as well. 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 can
tuna and man the terminology and the cookbooks words like
sinkers and floaters. Yeah, painting quite the image there. To
(27:20):
make the gelatine less see through, you add mayo or cream,
and until the nineteen seventies you could buy savory jellow
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
(27:41):
could reproduce this with 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 rain Aspects started skiing more and more
(28:02):
towards dessert, and then there was this damaging sundried 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.
(28:22):
One of my favorite descriptions I came across when researching
this called the aspect a culinary fossil and the 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
(28:43):
as a snack our dessert option. I believe they called
themselves the number one best selling dessert in the world.
I have to look into that more, but I'm pretty
sure there is one state where aspects of the savory
variety remained very popular, you're all, especially among the Mormon
popular as The state named it their state snack in
two thousand one, and the region is sometimes called the
(29:05):
Jello Belt. All Right, an 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.
(29:25):
But first we've got another quick word from our sponsor,
and we're back, Thank you sponsor. Okay, so science wise,
there are two important factors in making an aspect that's
(29:46):
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 make a stock cloudy are
too tiny to effectively sift out with strainers or cheese cloth.
(30:07):
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. Egg whites, as it turns out,
contain a protein called album in, which are positively charged molecules.
(30:31):
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 just skim it off, leaving a much clearer soup.
You can also use gelatin or other products that work
(30:52):
in a similar electromagnetic way to achieve a clear consummate.
And the technique has also been used in wine making
since 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 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
(31:14):
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 and around
degrees fahrenheit a k a thirty five degrees celsius, and
(31:36):
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 of amino acids.
By friendly, I mean that they're super willing to bond
up into complex matrices at room temperature, and they are
also happy to form bonds with water molecules. Uh. Elatin
(32:00):
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 gelatin molecules slip and slide and
wiggle apart from each other. As they cool, they chill out, literally,
and they grab up some water molecules and they cling
(32:22):
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 anything soluble
in water of flavorings and colorings will come along for
the ride. H m hm. You get in gelatine by
(32:44):
breaking down collagen, which is even longer chains of amino acids.
They're all twined up together. Collagen is a connective protein
in and around cells that that gives 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
(33:07):
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 these tissues, the collagen inside them untwined,
leaving you with gelatine 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
(33:29):
of failing, but failing deliciously the best way to fail.
These days, many chefs might prepare their aspects with packaged
gelatine or with vegetarian alternatives like 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
(33:52):
shown to improve patients uh blood blood levels. Of the
markers of collagen synthesis to help repair bones and keep
your teeth in skin healthy stuff like that. Sure, 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 Gilaton.
(34:13):
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 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
(34:35):
sound like modern art pieces to me. So there's a
lime cheese salad, tuna and jello pie super salad loaf
ar recipe courtesy of Hellman's Mayo. This involved stuffing an
empty bologny shell with the jelly of mash peas and
heaping with mayo. And also you've got bonus points for
(34:56):
adding radish roses. Radish roses were everywhere in these things. Yeah,
along those lines, molded mayonnaise salad, mostly cheese and mayo,
snowy chicken confetti salad, Emerald cantleope, jellied lamb salad, sauerkraut,
mold run and stuffed roast, pork bean and mushroom salad,
(35:21):
lemony salmon, tower, pressed ox tongue. So that'll I mean,
surely you're hungry by now. Surely you've got to be
absolutely So that brings us to the end of this
classic episode. We're hoping. Yeah, we hope you've enjoyed it
(35:43):
as much as I remember enjoying it the first time.
So good. Oh yeah, yeah, and we were we were
so bitty we didn't even know how to pronounce plenty yet.
It was ago young, so innocent. Um. We hope that
you all are staying safe and healthy and well. And
(36:05):
if you have any pictures of aspects you've made are
stumbled across, send them, please send them, Share them all,
Share them all right now? Yeah, you can email us
at hello at savor pod dot com. We're also on
social media. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and
Instagram at favor pod, and we do hope to hear
(36:26):
from you. Favor It's production of I Heart Radio. For
more podcast from my Heart Radio, you can visit the
iHeart Radio app or Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows. Thank you, as always to our
superproducers Dylan Bacan and Andrew Howard. Thanks to you for listening,
stay say, stay kind, stay well fed, and we hope
that lots more good things are coming your way.
Savor News
Hosts And Creators
Anney Reese
Lauren Vogelbaum
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