We Can't Believe People Actually Used To Eat This Vintage Seafood Dish

In the 1950s and '60s, it was tremendously popular. Home cooks would proudly carry the covered dish to the table and remove the lid with aplomb, revealing their artistic layered masterpiece. Guests would gasp in appreciation — or it could've been mortification. That dish was seafood aspic. 

Picture this: a jellied eel, with the shape created by the mold, made up of layers of tuna mixed with mayo for the body and arranged shrimp, peas, and radishes for color contrasts and decoration, immortalized in a jelly casing — with the actual head reattached to complete the look. Or, a dome-shaped jelly with a scary-looking underwater scene frozen in time inside, complete with crab constructed from canned crab meat, herbs for seaweed, and crumbed savory biscuits for the sand. These may have seemed artistic at the time, but these wobbly concoctions of sometimes really weirdly-paired ingredients are not tempting appetites nowadays. 

Aspics gained general America's attention in the early 1900s, when gelatin became available in powdered form, enabling home cooks to create the jelly casing quickly and easily. Previously, preparing aspic was a long and arduous task that involved boiling down meat, fish, and bones that were rich in collagen to reach a gelatinous state. This took hours, and that's before the cook even started working on the ingredients and their artistic layout that would be used inside the jelly.

Aspic has been around since the 1300s, when cooks discovered that this gelatinous casing helped to preserve meat and seafood, keeping bacteria and air locked out. This allowed food to be stored for longer, and also likely opened up access to seafood to those not living in coastal areas, and needed it to be transported from the coast inland. With refrigeration only being discovered in the mid-19th century, other methods of preservation had to be applied.

It was well-known French chef, Marie-Antoine Carême, who took functional aspic to the next level in the 1800s, transforming it into visual art in Napoleon's court. It caught on, and multiple cookbooks written by Carême took his creative ideas far afield. Art met science as ingredients were paired, colors and textures were matched, and masterful creations were created. Creating the aspic and packing it with flavor was a laborious task, with all the delicious tastes concentrated into the jelly. 

So, taking a bite of a delicate or sliceable aspic (two of the three types of aspics — the third being inedible, and used just for encasing foods), was a flavor punch of note. But people like convenience, and so the gelatin powder and sheets were eagerly adopted, and aspics saw a revival. Sadly, these manufactured gelatins lacked the intense flavor profile of the homemade versions and this, along with culinary trends shifting, saw the popularity of aspics peter out in the 1970s. Aspic is now relegated to the list of once common '50s foods that aren't around anymore.