Home › Salads › Beets and Peas in Aspic
Beets and Peas in Aspic
3 red beets 1 can French peas 1 dozen ripe olives 1/3 package vegetable gelatine 1 cup boiling water Juice 2 lemons Wash and cook two beets in boiling water until tender. Peel and cut into cubes and marinate with the juice of one lemon. Peel one beet and cut into small cubes. Cover with 1 1/2 cups of cold water and let simmer ten or fifteen minutes until the water is a rich red color. Drain and measure. There should be one cupful. Soak the vegetable gelatine in warm water twenty minutes. Drain and cook in the boiling water eight to ten minutes. Strain and add one-half cup to the beet water. To this jelly add the beets and sliced olives. Drain the juice from one can of French peas and marinate the peas with the juice from one lemon. To one cup of juice drained from the peas, add the remainder of the cooked vegetable gelatine. Then add the peas and fill a mold half full of this mixture. As this begins to solidify, add carefully enough of the beet mixture to fill the mold. When solidified, turn out upon a plate and garnish with slices of lemon.
A two-tone agar aspic that sets without refrigeration, which is exactly why it was worth making in a kitchen with an icebox and no freezer. The quantities are loose in places, so read through before starting.
- Vegetable gelatine is agar"Vegetable gelatine" here means agar-agar, sold today as flakes, powder or bars. It is not interchangeable with animal gelatine spoon for spoon: agar sets much more firmly, and it must be brought to a full boil to dissolve, which the recipe's eight to ten minutes of cooking accomplishes.
- "1/3 package" is unusable as writtenPackage sizes are not standardised and were not then. Work by weight instead: something in the range of 1 to 2 teaspoons of agar powder, or 1 to 2 tablespoons of flakes, will set 2 cups of liquid to a sliceable jelly, though brands differ. Test a spoonful on a cold saucer and adjust before committing the whole mold.
- The hinge: keep the two mixtures at the same stageAgar sets at about 100F, far above gelatine's setting point, so the beet layer will begin to firm on the counter within minutes. Pour it onto the pea layer while both are still warm and only just thickened, or the layers will not bond and the aspic will split when unmolded.
- French peasCanned petits pois, the small sweet French-style peas. Their canning liquid is the base of the green layer, so choose a brand you would taste on its own; if it is heavily salted, cut it with water.
- Beet waterSimmering raw diced beet in cold water gives the colour but very little flavour or body. A cup of the liquid from cooking the first two beets works better and wastes nothing.
- Season itNo salt appears anywhere in the original. Both layers need salt, and the lemon juice used for marinating should be worked into the liquids as well rather than drained away, or the aspic will taste of nothing but beet.
- Mold and unmoldingAllow a mold of 1 to 1 1/2 quarts; once the beets, olives and peas are counted, the two mixtures together come to more than a quart, and the pea layer is only to fill the mold half full. Oil it lightly; agar releases cleanly with a brief dip in warm water, and unlike gelatine it will not slump on a warm table.
- YieldServes four to six as a salad course, sliced and set on lettuce.
Molded vegetable aspics were a mainstay of the American "salad course" around the turn of the twentieth century, and agar-agar — a seaweed extract long used in East Asian cookery and adopted by Western laboratories as a culture medium — was the vegetarian cook's way into a genre otherwise built on calf's-foot and packaged animal gelatine. Books of meatless cookery from this period were written for a mixed audience. The presence of canned French peas alongside home-boiled beets is characteristic of the moment, and one might read a recipe that framed them in a jewel-red jelly as suggesting that a meatless table could look as composed as any other.