Futurist Madness

Jon has a copy of a Futurist cookbook and has been suggesting that we do a futurist dinner party for a while. Somehow this actually happened this weekend.

Andrea and I don't really understand futurism, so we figured that we'd go with doing something odd to a familiar dish, oh and regular geometric forms. Regular geometric forms are hard to realize with unadulterated food, so we needed a trick of some kind. The trick in this case was aspic; which I had been wanting to try out for a while anyway.

Luckily I had a bunch of aspic guidance in Jacques Pepin's Complete Techniques (what's classic French cooking without aspic glazes and plate decorations?) and my 1940s edition of Joy of Cooking (20 whole pages of molded salads!), because none of my normal cookbooks even mention it. Hey Mark Bittman: it's not really How to Cook Everything if you don't have a single aspic recipe!

For the aspic itself, I followed the recipe in Techniques pretty much verbatim. The base stock for this is a good thing to revisit since it's a relatively simple clear broth. Even the egg white part wasn't overly fussy.

The overall theme for the dish was roasted chicken and vegetables, freed from the tyranny of biological form (Is that futurist? I have no idea, but the thought makes me giggle a little bit.). So I made roasted chicken in the form of meatballs; the stuffing was done with breadcrumbs, egg yolks, onions, and herbs mixed into the meat (no distinct filling, that would have been nasty). To make things appropriately geometric, the meatballs were embedded in aspic cubes (pour a thin layer of aspic; let it set up in the fridge; add the cooled sauteed meatballs; pour over more aspic to cover). The vegetables were diced tomato aspic, diced pea aspic, diced carrots (roasted a bit after dicing to get them tender), and diced beets (roasted before dicing).

Finally, since many of the futurist recipes in the book seemed to include cologne, I made a "scent bowl" to accompany the food by tossing a bunch of thyme, marjoram, and lemon verbena into everclear and letting them extract overnight. To serve we strained the crazy-green liquid, put it in bowls with a bit of warm water, and put those on the table next to the serving platter. The idea was to waft some of the herb smell over your plate as serving and eating, but we forgot to move a bowl to the table while eating, so that didn't really happen and the gimmick stayed a gimmick.

Here's a quickie picture of the resulting serving plate (scent bowls not visible), I'm sure Andrea will produce a nicer one, but this is a start:


Some aspic lessons:

1. This stuff is actually very tasty. Big chunks of it (like the meatballs) are excessive, but in small quantities it's nice. Particularly the peas.
   
2. When layering aspic it's really important to make sure that neither the base layer nor the new stuff is too cold. We had to add a second top layer to the meatballs to get them completely covered and I poured it on too cold; it didn't really adhere at all.
3. The recipes for tomato and pea aspic in Techniques are for a plate garnish. The resulting aspics really weren't really firm enough to dice. The resulting texture was more pleasing to eat than it probably would have been if it were harder, but dicing it certainly was a fiddly pain in the ass.

We have some other pictures of other people's creations, including Jon's Meatloafians worshipping at Cati's amazing food pyramid (starting at the top: goat cheese, pate, tomato mousse, "kale thing", baguette), that I'll probably end up posting later.