Aspic aspirations

It seems that aspic has always been with us. Jelly covered piles of carved food are an excellent visual shorthand for absurdly poncey cuisine. Advertising pictures of aspics published by gelatine companies in the 50s are some of the most abidingly horrific ever taken and still have the power to appal to this day. 'Set in aspic' is so useful a metaphor, with its overtones of outdated convention that it's entered our national canon of cliche. Yet how many of us have ever eaten one?

For as long as cheap cuts have been boiled, cooks have been aware of the useful jelly created which, allowed to set around the cooked meat stopped air and bacteria from reaching it and could delay putrescence. It was Carême, the man who believed that cookery was a sub-discipline of architecture, who turned a simple kitchen trick into an art form.

Really cartilaginous pale meats - veal knuckle and pig trotter being the best examples - yield a clear, strong jelly with little marked taste. Carême would flavour this with clear consommes to make the setting medium for his creations. Like many cookery terms of the time 'aspic' has confused roots. In the 18th century it referred to the whole dish, with some sources claiming that 'aspic' compared to the bright, jewel like colours to those of an asp or snake. In later years, aspic came to mean the jelly medium itself.

Aspics really fired the public imagination during the industrial revolution. Gelatin was a by-product of mass animal processing, being extracted along with glue and fertiliser from bones, hooves, hides and tails. Like Marmite, a brewing by-product, it required only the power of advertising to turn this waste into money. Gelatine processors were assiduous suppliers of demonstrations, free samples, books and pamphlets which suggested setting almost anything in jelly.

In the early days it was most often fruit, chicken or perhaps sliced cold meat which could be encapsulated but by the 50's, particularly in America where a newly affluent middle-class sought innovation, suggestions started to appear for jellied hotdogs or even canned tuna in lime 'Jello'.

It's this last sort of madness which probably put an end to the age of aspics - there is something uniquely challenging to the modern palate about savoury jellies. It's difficult to imagine how a whole chicken 'chaud-froid' (covered with a layer of aspic with cream creating the effect of a thick white condom) would go down in a modern restaurant setting. Oeufs en gelée, the great French bistro classic of poached eggs in aspic, is currently experiencing a bit of a revival yet the experience of biting through pork pie jelly into a warm yolk can be, to say the least, polarising to the British palate. When AA Gill tried one recently at Aqua Nueva it caused him to write the most horribly memorable line in the last decade of British restaurant criticism " … it was like a big wine gum of pus, only not that nice."

Though it's still with us in spirit, aspic has pretty much passed from our collective menu, victim of excessive commercial exploitation and easy visual jokes - yet it seems like it might be fun and I'd love to give it a go.

Have you tried aspic? Does the idea appeal to you and do you think it's a dish worth reviving?