CHAPTER SIX
Aspic
CHAPTER SIX
Aspic
(as.pik) — A savory jelly made from meat stock that solidifies when cooled, often molded with slices of meat, vegetables, or eggs, and traditionally served cold. Once a delicacy of royal courts; now, a forgotten gem in the modern culinary lexicon.
According to a 1546 manuscript, aspics were the glory of the 18th-century French and Russian courts. In the 1800s, Tafelspitz-Sulz, an aspic with boiled beef, very much like what Grandmama devoured with delight every so often, was a favored dish of the Austrian Imperial family served at the grand Hotel Sacher in Vienna.
An aspic, even in the early 20th century in Russia, meant that you either had time on your hands, or the capital for domestic servants or professional cooks – not to mention the luxury of some form of refrigeration.
Aspic back then, in other words, was exclusive.
Here's my Tita Nene’s recipe should you want to savor some aspic in your near future. Hope you enjoy it as much as Lola Puti (White Grandmother) did!
Disclaimer: (traditional chefs, cover your eyes and ears) as much as I want to honor Tita Nene’s original recipe, I also understand the impracticality of toiling in the kitchen for many, many hours (or days), waiting for the broth to thicken on its own. So, we will speed up the process by using store-bought gelatin, Knox. ;)
ASPIC
ingredients
750 grams (about 1 1/2 lbs.) boiled leg of beef or round of beef
400 grams (3/4 lb.) beef tails (with marrow is best)
1 pint beef stock
1 onion
2 cloves
1 bay leaf
2 allspice berries or juniper berries
1 tsp black peppercorns
2 carrots
250 grams (8 oz) celery root
1 stalk leek
1 pouch of Knox white gelatin
White vinegar to taste
Salt
Pepper
preparation
1. Cut the onion into wedges and roast in a soup pot without oil or fat
2. Rinse the bones in cold water, rub dry and add to the soup pot with the onion. Roast for 5-10 minutes
3. Add the stock, spices, 1 ½ liters (6 ½ cups) of water, salt, pepper and bring to boil
4. Add the meat and simmer at reduced heat for about 2 hours. Skim off the foam every so often
5. Remove the meat from the soup, strain and reduce broth
6. Peel the celery root and carrots, then julienne. Slice the leek into rings and blanch all vegetables in the broth for 5 minutes
7. Remove the vegetables and drain
8. Soak the gelatin in cold water
9. Pour 400 ml (1 ½ cups) of the hot broth into a small bowl and dissolve the gelatin in it. The broth must be hot. Season with salt, pepper, and a little vinegar to taste
10. Cut or shred the meat into small pieces and place in a long mold as a first layer, alternating with the julienned vegetables and the broth mixture. Chill and set aside for at least 4 hours
11. Flip over the cooled mold and slice
12. Serve with a generous helping of strong horseradish cream sauce or the incredibly hot Russian mustard
Priyatnogo appetita! Bon Appetit!
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Once considered the delicacy of kings and emperors, aspic was a dish that demanded time, attention, and a certain reverence in the kitchen. In our household, only one woman dared attempt it: my aunt, Tita Nene. Tireless and devoted, she would rise at dawn when Grandmama requested it, to begin the alchemy of bones, marrow, and memory.
Aspic was not for the faint of heart — nor the rushed. The process required hours, sometimes days. Tita Nene would simmer beef leg and oxtail with onions, carrots, bay leaves, and peppercorns until the broth surrendered its collagen. She knew, instinctively, when the liquid had reached the perfect viscosity, when marrow had transformed into gelatin, and when flavor had deepened enough to satisfy the discerning palette of the woman we all served with a quiet kind of awe.
In today’s world, collagen has become the phenomena of the wellness world — the darling of influencers with bone broth mugs and hyaluronic sheet masks — but my Grandmother didn’t drink collagen. She dined on it, chilled and gleaming, like royalty.
Indeed, aspic was a dish of imperial proportions. The 18th-century Russian and French courts prized it; in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was often the centerpiece at grand banquets, served in silver molds at the Hotel Sacher in Vienna. Its presence suggested one of two things: either you had hours to spare, or the privilege to pay others who did. It was elegance, suspended in time — literally.
In our home in the tropics, far from the frozen rivers of Russia, Grandmama still craved the food of her childhood. While we Filipinos ate sinigang and adobo with rice, she requested cabbage-and-potato soups eaten with toast. She preferred her steak raw, ground and delicately seasoned with red onions, salt, and pepper — a kind of homemade tartare served either on dry toast or on its own, without embellishment. The dishes she longed for were echoes of another world, whispered through food.
Aspic was her favorite. Always aspic. Always served cold, with horseradish or a blisteringly sharp mustard. A single slice transported her — perhaps not just back in time, but across continents, to palaces no one else in the room could see.
To this day, I wonder if she was seeking something more than flavor. Perhaps it wasn’t just the aspic she craved — but the order, the ritual, the taste of a life interrupted.
Intriguingly, both steak tartare and aspic were dishes known to have been served regularly at the Russian imperial table by the celebrated chef Cubat. So, when Grandmama ate them, was she simply indulging in nostalgia? Or — and this is what haunted me as I grew older — was she reaching for something remembered?
She would never say it outright, of course. But you could see it — in the way she sat straighter when the aspic was placed before her, in the slight smile that flickered across her lips as the spoon broke through the translucent layer, releasing a cold shimmer of broth steeped in bone, bay leaf, and memory. It was a dish that belonged to her past — a past we were never permitted to fully name.
Although aspic was her favorite, it wasn’t alone. Grandmama’s palate was a tightly guarded kingdom with only a few permitted dishes. She craved the flavors of her former life — or rather, the life she never quite admitted to having.
In addition to the Cabbage soup with potatoes and homemade steak tartare with finely chopped onions, she dined on Pelmeni dumplings, adapted by our Filipino cook using ground pork, ground shrimp and cabbage in place of traditional Russian fillings. She didn’t eat rice, which baffled the rest of our family. Instead, she insisted on toast — dry and buttered — with her soups, her fish, and even with her soft-boiled eggs, which she called “itlock,” Tagalog-adjacent and uniquely her own.
She could be particular, even whimsical, in her cravings. She snacked on raw red onions like it was an apple, utterly unfazed by its pungency. Garlic cloves dipped in salt were, to her, what candies are to children. And yet, curiously, she never smelled of them. Her breath always carried a trace of fruit candies or nothing at all — as though her body refused to betray its secrets.
She loved fish — pan-seared in butter with cream sauce or in a broth during tropical storms. When farmers from my grandfather’s ancestral town, Candaba, visited, they brought sacks of live catfish, flopping and slippery on our kitchen floor before meeting their crispy fate in hot oil. I would scream as the cook chased the slippery creatures around the concrete floor of the dirty kitchen (an outdoor kitchen reserved for the more arduous kitchen tasks), a hammer in one hand, a look of grim efficiency in her eyes. To me, it was a horror scene. To the whole family, it was a feast. Crisp-fried catfish, served with fermented shrimp paste (bagoong), yumm.
Grandmama preferred the smoked variety — “tinapa” — though nothing delighted her more than a package of smoked salmon brought back by my mother from abroad. That alone could make her eyes shine. Her joy was childlike. No one else was allowed a slice. It was hers, and rightfully so. It tasted, she said, “just like home.”
And then there was caviar — the real kind, and the humble Filipino substitute: fish roe scraped from a pan-fried belly. My sister and I always fought over the tiniest orange pearls. Now, as an adult, the presence of true caviar on my plate never fails to conjure her face — regal, amused, savoring what remained of a life that had once been feast and famine, palace and exile, thunder and silence.
Food, for Grandmama, was never about indulgence. It was survival, identity, protest. She wasn’t hungry for sustenance — she was hungry for memory.
I often reflect on her favorites — the aspic, the pelmeni, the steak tartare, the caviar — and realize these were not just meals. They were codes. Each dish whispered where she had come from and what she had lost. The aspic especially — laborious, cold, precise — was a culinary metaphor for Grandmama herself: refined, inscrutable, yet filled with depth.
She never explained why she preferred her food a certain way. Just as she never explained why she read the morning newspaper with a magnifying glass, scanning each international headline inch by inch. Or why, during one of her rare storytelling moods, she accidentally referred to the Tsar not as “the Tsar” — but as “my father.”
We chalked it up to her eccentricity. But deep down, I think we knew. She was not eccentric. She was in exile.
To be able to choose one's food — in exile — was power.
And through her food, she let herself go home.