January 25, 2018 • 35 mins
Today Jell-O and other gelatin foodstuffs are generally relegated to world of desserts, but this wasn't always the case. In fact, gelatin took a long, strange path from ancient history to modern-day grocery shelves -- and got pretty gross along the way. Tune in to learn more about the bizarre world of savory gelatin.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:23):
America's most famous dessert. There's always room for jell. Hello,
my name is Ben. Oh. Yeah, that's gonna take me
a minute to wrap my head around. It's not worth it. No,
it is worth it. You you you kind of just
broke my brain. Um. But I guess I'm Noel, and
I think this is ridiculous history. And today we're talking
about jello, but not just any jello. I mean we're
(00:45):
gonna cook, We're gonna run the gamut of of all
gelatinous products, but specifically today we're talking about meat jello.
It's a real thing, and it's something that you and
I and our superproducer Casey Pegrum have talked about off
air in the past before we even started doing this show,
(01:05):
which is amazing when you think about it. Uh, you
and I and Casey and probably some of you friends
and neighbors have a preoccupation, a morbid fascination with gelatin. Yeah,
it's true. I mean I have a very distinct memory
from my childhood. Um, and it was my mother really
pride herself on doing these very elegant table settings, and
(01:28):
she carried on this tradition from her mother who always
used to make a little side dish with the alarmingly
odd name of Gentleman's salad. What is this gentleman's salad?
You might ask? What is this gentleman salad? I thought
you might ask. I'll tell you what it is. Ben
is a thing that was very in all the rage
(01:49):
of the highest fashion in the fifties and sixties, mid
century and beyond. Um fell out of fashion closer to
the late seventies and early eighties. But we'll get to that.
But what entleman salad is is a molded, gelatinous I
don't know if it's a dessert. It's not really served
in the place of a dessert. It's sort of a
pre meal thing like you'd eat a salad. But it's
(02:11):
not a leafy green No, it's a weird little gelatinous
mound of lime green stuff that's kind of full of nuts,
chopped nuts and marshmallows, I want to say, and topped
with a dollop of crem fresh or horse radish if
(02:31):
you want to get spicy, exactly. And it's one of
these things that as a kid, my mom insisted that
I take a bite, even though I just it was
just one of those things I just didn't trust my
little kid brain kind of recoiled at it um. It
didn't taste awful that the I avoided the horse radish,
but that was apparently I was missing out on the
full impact of the dish. But this was a thing,
(02:51):
and not just meat jello, but jello and general Gelatin
salads was a very easy way for cooks to show
kind of like opulence and and class and elegance. And
today we often think of a salad as something with
leafy greens, right, with fresh herbs, fresh vegetables, a little
(03:13):
bit of cheese, and maybe some protein in the form
of nazor tune or whatever. But a salad essentially is
only a mixture of different ingredients. So when we're saying
gelatin salad, we are accurately describing this strange phenomenon of
throwing everything and the kitchen sink into gelatin. And gelatine
(03:39):
is a very strange thing when you think about it.
We know that it's ancient. We know that traces of
gelatine were found in ancient Egypt, and we generally in
the West trace the use of gelatine as a food
stuff to medieval England. That's right, I actually found a
(04:00):
gelatin recipe from seventy seven from a London cookbook um
from an author by the name of Hannah Glass. And
we'll go into a little bit more of the modern
ways of making gelatine, But this is is the old
school way. I'm gonna read this verbatim because it is delightful.
So first take out the great bones of four calves
(04:22):
feet and put the feet into a pot with ten
quarts of water, three ounces of horse shorn, three ounces
of iceland glass, a nutmeg quartered, four blades of mace.
Then boil this till it comes to two quarts and
strain it through a flannel bag. Let it stand twenty
four hours. Then scrape all the fat from the top
very clean, then slice it and put to it the
(04:44):
whites of six eggs beaten to froth. Boil it a
little and strain it again through a flannel bag. Then
run the jelly into little high glasses. You may add orange,
flower water, or wine, and sugar and lemon if you please,
But this is all fancy. As you can see. We
are fans of collecting recipes from olden days, and we
(05:04):
have found that the measurements get kind of iffy and
ad hockey. But this is This is a real recipe.
And if you have these calves hooves or some orange water.
Was that orange water or sugar? It was orange flower water,
orange flower water. If you have this, please feel free
(05:26):
to make it. Please send us pictures. I know all
three of us would love to see it. Nowadays we
use the term jello synonymously with gelatine, but Jello is
a name brand with a history of its own. Uh.
The mix up here, The conflation is similar to the
way that people say google as a verb when they're
(05:48):
referring to any Internet or like X for any kind
of tissue, or like xerox for copiers. Gelatin itself brand
names aside is a transluse sense, colorless and flavorless thing
on its own, and you make it using collagen from
various animal parts, as we saw in our recipe with
(06:13):
calve's hooves. It's not just used in food. It's commonly
used as a jelling agent in food, but it's used
in a bunch of non food applications as well, photography,
vitamin capsules, and the way it's made today is obviously
much more of an industrial process. And just to kind
of give you the quick and dirty of how it's
made today. It's made using largely washed pig skins that
(06:37):
are then cleaned. Actually found a video online where it
shows the process in reverse, uh, from a nice little
gummy bear being popped into someone's mouth backward to all
the different steps of the manufacturing process until it ends
up with a cute little piggy looking you in the eye.
I think it was kind of designed to make you
feel bad about eating gummies. But we're not here to
(06:57):
tell you what to do. We are here to tell
you how jell to this mate. So these cleaned pig
skins are washed and then they are soaked and they're
given an acid treatment, and the idea is to break
down the tissues so that the collagen is kind of
made into smaller chunks in these strands of gelatine that
they call it gelatine noodles. In the manufacturing process, they
(07:21):
thicken when they're cooled, and then various stages of hot
water extraction is done, and it's done up to six
or seven times, with the temperature of the water um
being raised for every step UM and the earliest extractions
are apparently the more powerful, or I guess they hold
their shape better and the subsequent extractions, it becomes a
(07:43):
little bit weaker. And one of the things that baffles
us about this process is that most people growing up
don't know the gelatine or your favorite flavor of jello
does derive ultimately from these animal proteins. I think, you know,
it's not quite on the level of Santa Claus spoiler
(08:05):
alert everybody, but I think a lot of kids have
no understanding of the origin of gelatine that we just
walked through. And today we're asking why jello and gelatine
fiend food dishes became so prevalent for a time. It
was a fat They rose and they fell, and you
(08:28):
can find different cookbooks or different articles citing this rise.
But we wanted to track down the answer. And I
want to give a big shout out to Dan Myers
over at the Daily Meal. In January of last year,
he tackled this question about why there were so many
gelatine based dishes in the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties.
(08:49):
And you know, you and I have looked through these
old recipes and it's true jello today is treated mainly
as a dessert, but during that time period it it
would be the entire meal. You would have the sweet
and the savory together in this mold. There's really no
other way to say it. And those molds themselves were
(09:09):
staples of mid century kitchens and all kinds of shapes.
But this goes way way farther back than um the
nineteen fifties and sixties, far back really to medieval England.
And while we're while we're here in the medieval era
in Western Europe, we need to add a we need
(09:31):
to add another aspect to the story, another aspect to
the story. I'm proud of that one. So one of
the one of the most important things about gelatine, aside
from it being a luxurious food stuff, is that it
was a pretty effective preserver. We have to remember that
this was centuries before anything like refrigeration existed totally. And
(09:53):
also not to mention, an article from history dot com
called Jiggle It The History of Gelatine's Aspects and jellies Um.
The writer Nate Barksdale mentioned the fact that you know,
we've talked about this in the Protestant Information and Butter episode.
Catholics were not allowed to eat meat on Fridays, so
there were late medieval cooks who came up with ways
(10:14):
of making jelly out of fish, and that was like
that you would boil fish stock, even use the swim bladders.
Um and an eels were ways of making these, uh
these meat jellies. And there was another fish jelly product
called icing glass that was made using sturgeon. So this
(10:36):
was a way of being able to preserve that food
and also you know not eat pig products. And jellied eels,
by the way, are a traditional English dish that is
still popular today and I really want to try it.
Have you ever tried jellied eels? Just on the off
chance we didn't talk about No, no, you're not into it,
not for me, thank you? Well, well, you know, let's
(10:59):
put a p in in it. I don't want to
peer pressure you, but you know, what is life if
not to be lived, my old friend. One more little
story in Japan, even in the late sixteen hundreds, from
the same history dot com article, there was an innkeeper
from Kyoto named Minoya Tara Zoman who found some congealed soup,
some fish soup that had been thrown away and discarded,
(11:22):
and noticed that it was congealing. So that kind of
became the inspiration for seaweed jellies that became quite popular
throughout Asia and remain popular today. So we're doing pretty
well going chronologically here. Let's look at the first patent.
The first patent for the manufacture of gelatine arrives in
seventeen fifty four in England and at the time kind
(11:48):
of a novelty, but everybody knew about it. It's just
now somebody got the rights to it and it took off,
especially with the upper crust. Yeah, that's true, and it
wasn't the pat that was going to really win the
day for gelatine based products. That comes a little later.
But we do have the introduction of kind of someone
(12:08):
you could consider to be the world's first celebrity chef,
a man by the name of Marie Antoine Kara May
and in an NPR piece by Nicole Jankowski Um, she
kind of describes how karamy Um really revolutionized the use
of gelatine for these opulent culinary creations. Um he was
(12:30):
actually born uh sixteenth child of very very poor parents
in Paris in the late seventeen hundreds either see or
seventeen eighty four UM and was abandoned by his parents
during the most violent days of the French Revolution. He
worked his way up from a kitchen boy to an
apprentice of a well known pastry chef named Sylvan Bailey,
(12:54):
and then found his way to having his own shop.
And that was largely because he created these insane edible
replicas of late eighteenth century building, some of the most
famous buildings, things like the ancient ruins of Athens or
Chinese fortresses and things like that. And they were quite
tall and were displayed in the window his bakery, and
(13:17):
he turned some heads, folks like Napoleon Bonaparte and French
diplomats like Charles Maurice did Teleyrand Paragord decided to employ him,
and Paragord actually got him to make a full menu
for his own personal estate. And it was later when
he his creations made it to Europe when the Prince Regent,
(13:39):
George the Fourth asked him to come over and prepare
a menu for a party that he was having. Kara
Macy was a huge fan of Aspect, and I've kind
of been asking myself, like, what's the between aspect and
gelatine in general. It turns out Aspect specifically involves using
like a meat broth like, it's called a consumm and
it typically is savory, so it can include things like
(14:02):
vegetables or sliced beef or chicken or anything you could
think of. And Kara May coined this term show freud,
which was French for hot cold, and the idea was
that parts of it would be cooked and then it
would be served cold. But the whole idea was it
was a big it was a show. It was a
culinary display of that opulence that you talked about. This
(14:25):
is not something that anyone could have. You had to
have a whole staff to be able to prepare this thing.
I mean, it was a pretty serious, almost scientific process
of straining and setting, and in a time before industrialization
and refrigeration, it was a really big deal to be
able to make this stuff. And it caught on in
New York high society as well, and even Thomas Jefferson,
(14:46):
it is Monticello Estate was a huge fan of having
um wine gelatin served with meals. And that's a that's
a very interesting point there about the luxurious nature, lit
luxurious origin of this food stuff, of this application of food,
because later we're going to see this change to a
matter of convenience as well as status. We left off
(15:15):
the story with Thomas Jefferson. Let's fast forward to eighteen
forty five when we meet a fellow named Peter Cooper.
Along with being the inventor of the first American built
steam locomotive, Pete I'm gonna call him, Pete created a
way to make gelatine more accessible to the masses by
making it a powder. Uh. This is where we see
(15:38):
another patent come into play. He called this stuff portable
gelatine because all you had to do was to add
hot water. And unfortunately, although it's sure caught on later, uh,
Pete did not have much success marketing it and he
didn't really pursue his invention. Occasionally he sold it to cooks,
(16:00):
but he didn't commercialize it beyond that. He was actually
more into powdered glue. Believe it or not. Why don't
you think it caught on? And it seemed like it
was such a to do to make this stuff and
for someone to be able to be like, hey, I
got the quick fix right here for you for your
gel cooking. Right, that's a good point. It's a great question.
So let's go to Rochester, New York, A little town
(16:23):
outside of there, in fact, called Leroy. This is where
we meet a couple by the name of Pearl and
May Wait, who at the time that we find them
are running a not entirely successful cough syrup and laxative business.
It's a good combo. They should make a combination cough
syrup laxative from when you can't poop and you have
(16:43):
a bit of a group and that can they can
have that. That can be the tagline. It could be
like that combination pizza Hutt and taco bell song. I
think we just figured out their marketing for them. So
what's the scoop? Ben? What? What? What? What? What did
old Pearl and May come up with? I'm so glad
you asked, because fortunately for this episode it wasn't all
(17:05):
uh mediocre laxtive business, especially because we're a family show.
According to the Chemical Heritage Foundation, the Wait couple was
looking around for something they could do differently right away
to evolve their business into a more successful entity, and
they obtained that earlier patent for powdered gelatine. They also
(17:28):
encountered one of the big cons of gelatine at the time,
which is that it was tasteless. It was just sort
of like this translucent goop or you see a con.
I see a blank slate. Rife for innovation, and luckily
they did too, because they realized that they could add
syrups to this, and the gelatine, while it may not
have a flavor of its own, is an excellent platform
(17:51):
for other flavors. They blank slated it just as you said.
They added sugary fruit syrups like raspberry, strawberry, lemon, orange.
No word if it's orange flower, but orange that's close enough.
Orange flower is so vague. What kind of flower are
we talking about? I guess literally any flower that is
orange rose water. Yeah. It's interesting too, Ben, because before
(18:11):
the weights came into the picture, your buddy Peter Cooper,
he didn't just patent the gelatine. He patented a gelatine
dessert mix of his own creation, which was a powdered
mix with lemons um, sugar, eggs, and various spices. But
he just didn't have that marketing prow ass that was
required to really sell this to the world. And there
(18:32):
was a zeitgeist, the element to this stuff too, that
we'll get into in just a second. For now, you're
probably wondering, folks, where did this name jello come from?
We'll tell you. So. The weight couple had this gelatine idea, right,
and the way that they flavored it made it about
eight percent sugar, but they were overjoyed. Nobody was worried
(18:52):
about the sugar content at that time. They were overjoyed
because it tasted good. And may wait named this new
favorite dessert jello. It's a portmanteau combining the words gelatin
and jelly, both of which derived from the Latin meaning
to congeal or to freeze. And oh, man, it's good.
There we go. Yeah, that was good. As for the
(19:15):
O part, historians attributed it to just a naming trend.
It was apparently very popular to add oh at the
end of your product name. Wammo, there we go, bingo,
I feel like you're on a roll tally ho what
give us that that last one is? Yeah? You don't
if any Now you're right there, like wizzoh, Like not
(19:36):
only product names, but even like company names, right sure, yeah, blinko, rinko,
et cetera. Probably had like a futuristic vibe. Apparently, according
to the Dictionary of Trade Named Origins, which is a
real book. The practice began because adding oh seemed visually appealing.
In addition, you could take a common word and easily
(19:57):
modify it to make a trademark. An example would be
grain o real thing. That's so that's a legacy one too,
And it's cool too, because the one thing that's neat
about the jello thing, I mean needs not the right word.
But it's sort of like our buddy Edward Burnet's who
sort of figured out how to to, you know, show
the pork industry how they could sell this disgusting byproduct
(20:20):
we now know as bacon and make it like the
number one breakfast food in America. Gelatin was just a
way of like using these discarded scraps and bits from
the meat packing industry and turning it into something you
could then sell back to the public. But the most
important aspect of it that had been missing up to
this point was that marketing win that Edward Burnet's, who
(20:43):
was the godfather of advertising that sort of spin. Yeah, exactly. So.
Pearl and May were great at making jello, but they
weren't super fantastic at selling it, and they didn't have
the capital to push it out successfully. In the more.
And that's why on September eight, the couple sold the
(21:04):
formula patent and the name entire Jello, the entire brand
of Jello, to their neighbor man named Frank Woodward, who
at the time was the owner of the Genesee Food Company,
and they sold it for about what was it, four
and fifty dollars. Yeah, and with our handy dandy inflation calculator,
that equates to roughly eleven grand by today's standards. So
(21:26):
Woodward knew his business. He was already successful at selling
packaged food, and he took the techniques he learned and
applied them to Jello. He had his salesforce dressed in
fancy suits and go around the houses offering free samples,
right just like the bad kids do in every drug
warning p s A. The first one is free. And
(21:49):
they would do so many things to convince grocery store
owners to stock shelves with boxes of this powder gelatin Jello.
And they still had the original four flavors strawberry, raspberry, lemon,
and orange. But it didn't succeed. Still, like three people
(22:10):
have tried this now with you know, middling success and
a great article on Sirius Eats by Sarah Gray that
kind of chronicles the history of the Jello salad um mentions.
A little book by the name of the Jungle by
Upton Sinclair came out in nineteen o six that essentially
single handedly helped establish the Food and Drug Act, which
(22:31):
created the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration that we
know today. And it became a big deal um for
food to have labels and for things to be seen
as safe and pure. And Jello really jumped all over
that and started using terms like the safety bag and
the repeated the word pure um according to this article
(22:53):
no less than three times, even adding it to like
the company's slogan. Right, So let's let's take a closer
look at Woodward here. So he's doing his best, he's
got the expertise. It was around nineteen o four when
he and a new employee named William hummel Ball had
a brilliant idea. They put ads for Jello in the
(23:17):
Ladies Home Journal and nationally syndicated magazine, and they featured smiling,
fashionable homemakers in spotless white aprons, proclaiming that jello was
quote America's favorite dessert and along with the worries of
safety that we're also in the zeitgeist. At the time,
(23:39):
Jello was propelled to the mainstream. Annual sales jumped to
two hundred and fifty thousand dollars that that would be
around six a little over six million today, and kids
were begging for the dessert because I'm sure, as you know, folks,
if you can convince kids to want something, the parents
(23:59):
will you usually follow the lead. And as Noel said,
the cookbooks began to take off. World War One did
affect rationing, and after World War Two, Gelatin's success persisted.
It became seen as a creative cooking tool. And at
(24:22):
this point, finally, after numerous people had tried to market gelatin,
it began to take off. It took off in the
craziest way. We found. We found some weird examples. Yeah,
it's true. A guy named Charles Knox who had his
own I don't know. I look at it as sort
of the utilitarian cousin of Jello. It was just the
(24:43):
Knox Gelatin Company, um, and it was just a packet.
It looks very much the same today as it did then,
very little bells and whistles, no flavors, He took it
to the World's Fair in nineteen o four and had
a competition where um, anyone could submit their own recipes
using gelatine. And a woman who here in this Serious
Eats article is only referred to as Mrs John Cook
(25:06):
from Newcastle, Pennsylvania one third prize in the competition with
a thing that she created called perfection salad, not gentleman salad.
Perfection salad. And I actually found a recipe for this thing.
I'm gonna describe it to you. Um. It is a
mountain of molded orange, kind of foggy gelatin, filled with
(25:29):
an assortment of shredded uh rough etsch And the recipe
goes like this. Two envelopes unflavored gelatine, a half cup sugar,
one teaspoons salt, one can apple juice, a half cup
lemon juice, two tablespoons vinegar, one cup shredded carrot, one
cup sliced celery, one cup finally shredded cabbage, a half
cup chopped green pepper, and one can chopped pimiento. Um.
(25:53):
And it is if absolutely foul looking, but it caught on.
People loved it. They wanted to be part of the
jello wave. Of the future, and this really kind of
created this demand. And another era we're using jello showed
opulence because we were entering the time of refrigeration. As
(26:16):
the United States enters this industrial boom, the world of
two point five kids, a car in every garage, and
endless suburbs, people wanted to keep up with the Joneses
and one of the best ways to do it was
to have the latest appliance. Right is similar to microwave cooking.
(26:39):
A little bit later in history, people wanted to have refrigerators.
And if you were bringing a jellous salad to the
pot luck or to the party that I don't know,
the kid's birthday party, of the barbecue, it showed that
you and your family had one of those new fangled refrigerators.
And we cannot, we cannot overestimate Mrs Cook's effect on
(27:02):
the demand for jello. Food. Historian James Beard observed in
his in his book American Cookery that Mrs Cook's victory
at the World's Fair unleashed a demand for congealed salads that,
according to Beard, this is the nineteen seventy two He says,
this a demand for congealed salads that has grown alarmingly,
(27:23):
particularly in the suburbs, alarmingly the invasion of the jello mold.
He went on, as well, he did, he couched it.
He went on to say, quote, the jellied salad does
have its delights, though, and it is without question an
American innovation, no doubt about it. Mr Beard here here.
So now we've we've set the stage. We've got knocks,
(27:45):
we've got jello. We've got people nowadays arguing that you
can follow American social history by looking at the history
of jello ass And now we haven't really talked about
this much, but there was a whole kind of iconography
associated with jello packaging. Some of early ones used illustrations
by Norman Rockwell, right. And then there was what was
it been, the jello girl, sort of like a spokes thing,
(28:08):
introduced in nineteen o eight and instrumental, crucial in making
American consumers connect the idea of jello with again the purity,
the innocence of childhood. And although sales of sugar and
you know, therefore, jello were rationed during World War One.
(28:30):
Between the twenties and thirties, the popularity of gelatin salads
sores and there were pragmatic reasons behind this. The depression
forced homemakers to stretch ingredients as far as possible. That
also included things like sugar that you would have separately
in many recipes require you to add sugar. You didn't
(28:50):
have to do that when you're using jello because the
sugar was already part of the mix. Yeah, that's that's
a really good point. And so now we see not
just the idea of refrigeration that comes into plate later,
but we also see the idea of status, of proving
to your friends and neighbors that you can still do
some top notch entertaining despite the rations, despite the shortages.
(29:13):
I've got a recipe for all of relish, which I've
been a savior, the savior the trouble here, folks, it
seems kind of gross. Olives, pickles, celery, and vinegar all
in a lovely, a lovely amalgamation with lime jello. Right right,
But but now we see kind of a Bernesian, if
(29:35):
I could use that word, bern Asian approach to marketing here,
or and aspect of it, because we have to ask ourselves,
did people genuinely like this stuff or did they instead
like being people who could make it. Well, it's like
I said, with my mom and the gentleman salad. Her
mom would have come from that original time where this
(29:57):
was something that was seen as a status symbol, and
she was all about these statas symbols. That's where my
mom got the whole idea of having a lovely table
place setting. It was all very very important during times
where things were much more scarce to show that you
were kind of above the fray. I guess. I mean
it seems a little, I don't know, a little shallow
to me personally, but I can see how it would
(30:19):
have felt important to kind of keep your spirits up
and to make your family feel like you had you know,
you were one of the halves. I guess um. But
of course, like things do, these these kind of jello
salad aspect meat monstrosities fell out of favor and jello
kind of took its was its original place as an
(30:41):
easy to make dessert. You had Bill Cosby swooping in,
you know, back when he wasn't persona non grata, uh,
advertising Jello jigglers. Remember, Jello jigglers was for kids. They
used like a little cookie cutter and they were a
little they used a little bit stiffer gelatine, I think,
so you could pick them up and play with them.
They wanted a gritty reboot. You're absolutely right. By the
(31:03):
nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, the golden age of Jello
had sort of passed. And that's why in nine six
they decided to rebrand. They got Bill Cosby, phenomenally successful
comic at the time. Uh. And it was sort of
the world made new because Americans were no longer as
readily familiar with the concept of aspects. And if you
(31:28):
had brought a perfection salad or a couple of other
really choice gentatsin dishes that will probably read off at
the end. If you brought those to a potluck in
the seventies or eighties, people would be like, what are
you doing? I thought we were friends. Why why can't
you just tell me you don't like me? Exactly? Yeah,
it's sort of like bringing someone a fruitcake for Christmas.
(31:49):
Oh yeah, we did do an episode and the oldest fruitcake,
remember that. And it goes back to that that question
you asked earlier, Ben, Did people really like the way
this stuff tasted or was it just like the placebo
effect of kind of associating it with status, and therefore
you could choke it down. Um. I like all kinds
of stuff, Ben, I'm a relatively adventurous eater, but literally
(32:10):
every single one of these things seems absolutely inedible and
disgusting to me. And I don't think I could ever
convince myself otherwise, you know. Yeah, but we also have
to remember that that numerous folks in the audience wrote
back about vinegar pie, and you were all absolutely correct.
I'm kind of converted. Oh it sounds great, but I'm
(32:31):
not gonna try and tell you what I'm not gonna try.
Let's let's read off some these gross recipes, all right,
So Emerald cantle ope is not that bad. You put lime,
jello and can pineapple on the candle. It's fun. Yeah,
it's fun. It fills the is it, It fills the gap.
There's another one with a with a melon. You can
do that kind of You cut a half a melon
in half and and you put jello in the in
(32:51):
the hole and that you know, you can scoop it out,
so it's sort of like a double texture for your money.
Tell you what, though, Salmon and cottage cheese with boiled
eggs as a garnish, No, sir, No, I'm just thoted
to a jelly lamb salad. No has a pass. I
know we talked about lime jelly salads, but do we
talk about lime cheese salad? Nope? Do you want to
(33:15):
skip that with? Oh? I you know, I do have
that that I think is a modern example of this
actually working and and for me personally, Um, there is
a place here in Atlanta called the Spotted Trotter that
makes their own pattas, and a lot of pattas will
have a little layer of aspect on the top, so
it's just like a small layer of like a ginger aspect,
(33:36):
so that it's made with like a consumer of beef broth,
but it's flavored with ginger and when it's almost like
a jelly or a chutney of some kind. So it's
really good for like you know, mixing with a pat
or putting on a piece of toast or something like that.
It sort of mixes the savory with the sweet. But
to me, it's when you really go full board down
that you know, savory jello thing. That's just it's just
(33:59):
I like it maybe as like a garnish or as
an additive, but you know, all on its own. Oh boy,
and the photography and some of these cookbooks, it's just
like who gave the green light to that picture? You know.
We invite you to check these out firsthand and send
us some of your favorites and favorite here is a
(34:19):
tricky word. It can be the one that you were
most fascinated by or the one you have actually tried.
We we, of course, they're not knocking anybody's personal taste.
You can send us that stuff too ridiculous at how
stuff works dot com or hit us up on the
social media the Facebook, the Instagram. We are also Ridiculous History.
As always, we'd like to thank our super producer Casey
(34:42):
Pegram as well as author Maria tri Marchie, who wrote
Ridiculous History. What's for Dinner? Meet Jello available on how
Stuff works dot com. Also thanks to our pal Alex
Williams for composing our theme um and most importantly, thanks
to you guys for tuning in and hanging out with
us for another episode of Ridiculous History. We'll see you
next time.
America's most famous dessert. There's always room for jell. Hello,
my name is Ben. Oh. Yeah, that's gonna take me
a minute to wrap my head around. It's not worth it. No,
it is worth it. You you you kind of just
broke my brain. Um. But I guess I'm Noel, and
I think this is ridiculous history. And today we're talking
about jello, but not just any jello. I mean we're
(00:45):
gonna cook, We're gonna run the gamut of of all
gelatinous products, but specifically today we're talking about meat jello.
It's a real thing, and it's something that you and
I and our superproducer Casey Pegrum have talked about off
air in the past before we even started doing this show,
(01:05):
which is amazing when you think about it. Uh, you
and I and Casey and probably some of you friends
and neighbors have a preoccupation, a morbid fascination with gelatin. Yeah,
it's true. I mean I have a very distinct memory
from my childhood. Um, and it was my mother really
pride herself on doing these very elegant table settings, and
(01:28):
she carried on this tradition from her mother who always
used to make a little side dish with the alarmingly
odd name of Gentleman's salad. What is this gentleman's salad?
You might ask? What is this gentleman salad? I thought
you might ask. I'll tell you what it is. Ben
is a thing that was very in all the rage
(01:49):
of the highest fashion in the fifties and sixties, mid
century and beyond. Um fell out of fashion closer to
the late seventies and early eighties. But we'll get to that.
But what entleman salad is is a molded, gelatinous I
don't know if it's a dessert. It's not really served
in the place of a dessert. It's sort of a
pre meal thing like you'd eat a salad. But it's
(02:11):
not a leafy green No, it's a weird little gelatinous
mound of lime green stuff that's kind of full of nuts,
chopped nuts and marshmallows, I want to say, and topped
with a dollop of crem fresh or horse radish if
(02:31):
you want to get spicy, exactly. And it's one of
these things that as a kid, my mom insisted that
I take a bite, even though I just it was
just one of those things I just didn't trust my
little kid brain kind of recoiled at it um. It
didn't taste awful that the I avoided the horse radish,
but that was apparently I was missing out on the
full impact of the dish. But this was a thing,
(02:51):
and not just meat jello, but jello and general Gelatin
salads was a very easy way for cooks to show
kind of like opulence and and class and elegance. And
today we often think of a salad as something with
leafy greens, right, with fresh herbs, fresh vegetables, a little
(03:13):
bit of cheese, and maybe some protein in the form
of nazor tune or whatever. But a salad essentially is
only a mixture of different ingredients. So when we're saying
gelatin salad, we are accurately describing this strange phenomenon of
throwing everything and the kitchen sink into gelatin. And gelatine
(03:39):
is a very strange thing when you think about it.
We know that it's ancient. We know that traces of
gelatine were found in ancient Egypt, and we generally in
the West trace the use of gelatine as a food
stuff to medieval England. That's right, I actually found a
(04:00):
gelatin recipe from seventy seven from a London cookbook um
from an author by the name of Hannah Glass. And
we'll go into a little bit more of the modern
ways of making gelatine, But this is is the old
school way. I'm gonna read this verbatim because it is delightful.
So first take out the great bones of four calves
(04:22):
feet and put the feet into a pot with ten
quarts of water, three ounces of horse shorn, three ounces
of iceland glass, a nutmeg quartered, four blades of mace.
Then boil this till it comes to two quarts and
strain it through a flannel bag. Let it stand twenty
four hours. Then scrape all the fat from the top
very clean, then slice it and put to it the
(04:44):
whites of six eggs beaten to froth. Boil it a
little and strain it again through a flannel bag. Then
run the jelly into little high glasses. You may add orange,
flower water, or wine, and sugar and lemon if you please,
But this is all fancy. As you can see. We
are fans of collecting recipes from olden days, and we
(05:04):
have found that the measurements get kind of iffy and
ad hockey. But this is This is a real recipe.
And if you have these calves hooves or some orange water.
Was that orange water or sugar? It was orange flower water,
orange flower water. If you have this, please feel free
(05:26):
to make it. Please send us pictures. I know all
three of us would love to see it. Nowadays we
use the term jello synonymously with gelatine, but Jello is
a name brand with a history of its own. Uh.
The mix up here, The conflation is similar to the
way that people say google as a verb when they're
(05:48):
referring to any Internet or like X for any kind
of tissue, or like xerox for copiers. Gelatin itself brand
names aside is a transluse sense, colorless and flavorless thing
on its own, and you make it using collagen from
various animal parts, as we saw in our recipe with
(06:13):
calve's hooves. It's not just used in food. It's commonly
used as a jelling agent in food, but it's used
in a bunch of non food applications as well, photography,
vitamin capsules, and the way it's made today is obviously
much more of an industrial process. And just to kind
of give you the quick and dirty of how it's
made today. It's made using largely washed pig skins that
(06:37):
are then cleaned. Actually found a video online where it
shows the process in reverse, uh, from a nice little
gummy bear being popped into someone's mouth backward to all
the different steps of the manufacturing process until it ends
up with a cute little piggy looking you in the eye.
I think it was kind of designed to make you
feel bad about eating gummies. But we're not here to
(06:57):
tell you what to do. We are here to tell
you how jell to this mate. So these cleaned pig
skins are washed and then they are soaked and they're
given an acid treatment, and the idea is to break
down the tissues so that the collagen is kind of
made into smaller chunks in these strands of gelatine that
they call it gelatine noodles. In the manufacturing process, they
(07:21):
thicken when they're cooled, and then various stages of hot
water extraction is done, and it's done up to six
or seven times, with the temperature of the water um
being raised for every step UM and the earliest extractions
are apparently the more powerful, or I guess they hold
their shape better and the subsequent extractions, it becomes a
(07:43):
little bit weaker. And one of the things that baffles
us about this process is that most people growing up
don't know the gelatine or your favorite flavor of jello
does derive ultimately from these animal proteins. I think, you know,
it's not quite on the level of Santa Claus spoiler
(08:05):
alert everybody, but I think a lot of kids have
no understanding of the origin of gelatine that we just
walked through. And today we're asking why jello and gelatine
fiend food dishes became so prevalent for a time. It
was a fat They rose and they fell, and you
(08:28):
can find different cookbooks or different articles citing this rise.
But we wanted to track down the answer. And I
want to give a big shout out to Dan Myers
over at the Daily Meal. In January of last year,
he tackled this question about why there were so many
gelatine based dishes in the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties.
(08:49):
And you know, you and I have looked through these
old recipes and it's true jello today is treated mainly
as a dessert, but during that time period it it
would be the entire meal. You would have the sweet
and the savory together in this mold. There's really no
other way to say it. And those molds themselves were
(09:09):
staples of mid century kitchens and all kinds of shapes.
But this goes way way farther back than um the
nineteen fifties and sixties, far back really to medieval England.
And while we're while we're here in the medieval era
in Western Europe, we need to add a we need
(09:31):
to add another aspect to the story, another aspect to
the story. I'm proud of that one. So one of
the one of the most important things about gelatine, aside
from it being a luxurious food stuff, is that it
was a pretty effective preserver. We have to remember that
this was centuries before anything like refrigeration existed totally. And
(09:53):
also not to mention, an article from history dot com
called Jiggle It The History of Gelatine's Aspects and jellies Um.
The writer Nate Barksdale mentioned the fact that you know,
we've talked about this in the Protestant Information and Butter episode.
Catholics were not allowed to eat meat on Fridays, so
there were late medieval cooks who came up with ways
(10:14):
of making jelly out of fish, and that was like
that you would boil fish stock, even use the swim bladders.
Um and an eels were ways of making these, uh
these meat jellies. And there was another fish jelly product
called icing glass that was made using sturgeon. So this
(10:36):
was a way of being able to preserve that food
and also you know not eat pig products. And jellied eels,
by the way, are a traditional English dish that is
still popular today and I really want to try it.
Have you ever tried jellied eels? Just on the off
chance we didn't talk about No, no, you're not into it,
not for me, thank you? Well, well, you know, let's
(10:59):
put a p in in it. I don't want to
peer pressure you, but you know, what is life if
not to be lived, my old friend. One more little
story in Japan, even in the late sixteen hundreds, from
the same history dot com article, there was an innkeeper
from Kyoto named Minoya Tara Zoman who found some congealed soup,
some fish soup that had been thrown away and discarded,
(11:22):
and noticed that it was congealing. So that kind of
became the inspiration for seaweed jellies that became quite popular
throughout Asia and remain popular today. So we're doing pretty
well going chronologically here. Let's look at the first patent.
The first patent for the manufacture of gelatine arrives in
seventeen fifty four in England and at the time kind
(11:48):
of a novelty, but everybody knew about it. It's just
now somebody got the rights to it and it took off,
especially with the upper crust. Yeah, that's true, and it
wasn't the pat that was going to really win the
day for gelatine based products. That comes a little later.
But we do have the introduction of kind of someone
(12:08):
you could consider to be the world's first celebrity chef,
a man by the name of Marie Antoine Kara May
and in an NPR piece by Nicole Jankowski Um, she
kind of describes how karamy Um really revolutionized the use
of gelatine for these opulent culinary creations. Um he was
(12:30):
actually born uh sixteenth child of very very poor parents
in Paris in the late seventeen hundreds either see or
seventeen eighty four UM and was abandoned by his parents
during the most violent days of the French Revolution. He
worked his way up from a kitchen boy to an
apprentice of a well known pastry chef named Sylvan Bailey,
(12:54):
and then found his way to having his own shop.
And that was largely because he created these insane edible
replicas of late eighteenth century building, some of the most
famous buildings, things like the ancient ruins of Athens or
Chinese fortresses and things like that. And they were quite
tall and were displayed in the window his bakery, and
(13:17):
he turned some heads, folks like Napoleon Bonaparte and French
diplomats like Charles Maurice did Teleyrand Paragord decided to employ him,
and Paragord actually got him to make a full menu
for his own personal estate. And it was later when
he his creations made it to Europe when the Prince Regent,
(13:39):
George the Fourth asked him to come over and prepare
a menu for a party that he was having. Kara
Macy was a huge fan of Aspect, and I've kind
of been asking myself, like, what's the between aspect and
gelatine in general. It turns out Aspect specifically involves using
like a meat broth like, it's called a consumm and
it typically is savory, so it can include things like
(14:02):
vegetables or sliced beef or chicken or anything you could
think of. And Kara May coined this term show freud,
which was French for hot cold, and the idea was
that parts of it would be cooked and then it
would be served cold. But the whole idea was it
was a big it was a show. It was a
culinary display of that opulence that you talked about. This
(14:25):
is not something that anyone could have. You had to
have a whole staff to be able to prepare this thing.
I mean, it was a pretty serious, almost scientific process
of straining and setting, and in a time before industrialization
and refrigeration, it was a really big deal to be
able to make this stuff. And it caught on in
New York high society as well, and even Thomas Jefferson,
(14:46):
it is Monticello Estate was a huge fan of having
um wine gelatin served with meals. And that's a that's
a very interesting point there about the luxurious nature, lit
luxurious origin of this food stuff, of this application of food,
because later we're going to see this change to a
matter of convenience as well as status. We left off
(15:15):
the story with Thomas Jefferson. Let's fast forward to eighteen
forty five when we meet a fellow named Peter Cooper.
Along with being the inventor of the first American built
steam locomotive, Pete I'm gonna call him, Pete created a
way to make gelatine more accessible to the masses by
making it a powder. Uh. This is where we see
(15:38):
another patent come into play. He called this stuff portable
gelatine because all you had to do was to add
hot water. And unfortunately, although it's sure caught on later, uh,
Pete did not have much success marketing it and he
didn't really pursue his invention. Occasionally he sold it to cooks,
(16:00):
but he didn't commercialize it beyond that. He was actually
more into powdered glue. Believe it or not. Why don't
you think it caught on? And it seemed like it
was such a to do to make this stuff and
for someone to be able to be like, hey, I
got the quick fix right here for you for your
gel cooking. Right, that's a good point. It's a great question.
So let's go to Rochester, New York, A little town
(16:23):
outside of there, in fact, called Leroy. This is where
we meet a couple by the name of Pearl and
May Wait, who at the time that we find them
are running a not entirely successful cough syrup and laxative business.
It's a good combo. They should make a combination cough
syrup laxative from when you can't poop and you have
(16:43):
a bit of a group and that can they can
have that. That can be the tagline. It could be
like that combination pizza Hutt and taco bell song. I
think we just figured out their marketing for them. So
what's the scoop? Ben? What? What? What? What? What did
old Pearl and May come up with? I'm so glad
you asked, because fortunately for this episode it wasn't all
(17:05):
uh mediocre laxtive business, especially because we're a family show.
According to the Chemical Heritage Foundation, the Wait couple was
looking around for something they could do differently right away
to evolve their business into a more successful entity, and
they obtained that earlier patent for powdered gelatine. They also
(17:28):
encountered one of the big cons of gelatine at the time,
which is that it was tasteless. It was just sort
of like this translucent goop or you see a con.
I see a blank slate. Rife for innovation, and luckily
they did too, because they realized that they could add
syrups to this, and the gelatine, while it may not
have a flavor of its own, is an excellent platform
(17:51):
for other flavors. They blank slated it just as you said.
They added sugary fruit syrups like raspberry, strawberry, lemon, orange.
No word if it's orange flower, but orange that's close enough.
Orange flower is so vague. What kind of flower are
we talking about? I guess literally any flower that is
orange rose water. Yeah. It's interesting too, Ben, because before
(18:11):
the weights came into the picture, your buddy Peter Cooper,
he didn't just patent the gelatine. He patented a gelatine
dessert mix of his own creation, which was a powdered
mix with lemons um, sugar, eggs, and various spices. But
he just didn't have that marketing prow ass that was
required to really sell this to the world. And there
(18:32):
was a zeitgeist, the element to this stuff too, that
we'll get into in just a second. For now, you're
probably wondering, folks, where did this name jello come from?
We'll tell you. So. The weight couple had this gelatine idea, right,
and the way that they flavored it made it about
eight percent sugar, but they were overjoyed. Nobody was worried
(18:52):
about the sugar content at that time. They were overjoyed
because it tasted good. And may wait named this new
favorite dessert jello. It's a portmanteau combining the words gelatin
and jelly, both of which derived from the Latin meaning
to congeal or to freeze. And oh, man, it's good.
There we go. Yeah, that was good. As for the
(19:15):
O part, historians attributed it to just a naming trend.
It was apparently very popular to add oh at the
end of your product name. Wammo, there we go, bingo,
I feel like you're on a roll tally ho what
give us that that last one is? Yeah? You don't
if any Now you're right there, like wizzoh, Like not
(19:36):
only product names, but even like company names, right sure, yeah, blinko, rinko,
et cetera. Probably had like a futuristic vibe. Apparently, according
to the Dictionary of Trade Named Origins, which is a
real book. The practice began because adding oh seemed visually appealing.
In addition, you could take a common word and easily
(19:57):
modify it to make a trademark. An example would be
grain o real thing. That's so that's a legacy one too,
And it's cool too, because the one thing that's neat
about the jello thing, I mean needs not the right word.
But it's sort of like our buddy Edward Burnet's who
sort of figured out how to to, you know, show
the pork industry how they could sell this disgusting byproduct
(20:20):
we now know as bacon and make it like the
number one breakfast food in America. Gelatin was just a
way of like using these discarded scraps and bits from
the meat packing industry and turning it into something you
could then sell back to the public. But the most
important aspect of it that had been missing up to
this point was that marketing win that Edward Burnet's, who
(20:43):
was the godfather of advertising that sort of spin. Yeah, exactly. So.
Pearl and May were great at making jello, but they
weren't super fantastic at selling it, and they didn't have
the capital to push it out successfully. In the more.
And that's why on September eight, the couple sold the
(21:04):
formula patent and the name entire Jello, the entire brand
of Jello, to their neighbor man named Frank Woodward, who
at the time was the owner of the Genesee Food Company,
and they sold it for about what was it, four
and fifty dollars. Yeah, and with our handy dandy inflation calculator,
that equates to roughly eleven grand by today's standards. So
(21:26):
Woodward knew his business. He was already successful at selling
packaged food, and he took the techniques he learned and
applied them to Jello. He had his salesforce dressed in
fancy suits and go around the houses offering free samples,
right just like the bad kids do in every drug
warning p s A. The first one is free. And
(21:49):
they would do so many things to convince grocery store
owners to stock shelves with boxes of this powder gelatin Jello.
And they still had the original four flavors strawberry, raspberry, lemon,
and orange. But it didn't succeed. Still, like three people
(22:10):
have tried this now with you know, middling success and
a great article on Sirius Eats by Sarah Gray that
kind of chronicles the history of the Jello salad um mentions.
A little book by the name of the Jungle by
Upton Sinclair came out in nineteen o six that essentially
single handedly helped establish the Food and Drug Act, which
(22:31):
created the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration that we
know today. And it became a big deal um for
food to have labels and for things to be seen
as safe and pure. And Jello really jumped all over
that and started using terms like the safety bag and
the repeated the word pure um according to this article
(22:53):
no less than three times, even adding it to like
the company's slogan. Right, So let's let's take a closer
look at Woodward here. So he's doing his best, he's
got the expertise. It was around nineteen o four when
he and a new employee named William hummel Ball had
a brilliant idea. They put ads for Jello in the
(23:17):
Ladies Home Journal and nationally syndicated magazine, and they featured smiling,
fashionable homemakers in spotless white aprons, proclaiming that jello was
quote America's favorite dessert and along with the worries of
safety that we're also in the zeitgeist. At the time,
(23:39):
Jello was propelled to the mainstream. Annual sales jumped to
two hundred and fifty thousand dollars that that would be
around six a little over six million today, and kids
were begging for the dessert because I'm sure, as you know, folks,
if you can convince kids to want something, the parents
(23:59):
will you usually follow the lead. And as Noel said,
the cookbooks began to take off. World War One did
affect rationing, and after World War Two, Gelatin's success persisted.
It became seen as a creative cooking tool. And at
(24:22):
this point, finally, after numerous people had tried to market gelatin,
it began to take off. It took off in the
craziest way. We found. We found some weird examples. Yeah,
it's true. A guy named Charles Knox who had his
own I don't know. I look at it as sort
of the utilitarian cousin of Jello. It was just the
(24:43):
Knox Gelatin Company, um, and it was just a packet.
It looks very much the same today as it did then,
very little bells and whistles, no flavors, He took it
to the World's Fair in nineteen o four and had
a competition where um, anyone could submit their own recipes
using gelatine. And a woman who here in this Serious
Eats article is only referred to as Mrs John Cook
(25:06):
from Newcastle, Pennsylvania one third prize in the competition with
a thing that she created called perfection salad, not gentleman salad.
Perfection salad. And I actually found a recipe for this thing.
I'm gonna describe it to you. Um. It is a
mountain of molded orange, kind of foggy gelatin, filled with
(25:29):
an assortment of shredded uh rough etsch And the recipe
goes like this. Two envelopes unflavored gelatine, a half cup sugar,
one teaspoons salt, one can apple juice, a half cup
lemon juice, two tablespoons vinegar, one cup shredded carrot, one
cup sliced celery, one cup finally shredded cabbage, a half
cup chopped green pepper, and one can chopped pimiento. Um.
(25:53):
And it is if absolutely foul looking, but it caught on.
People loved it. They wanted to be part of the
jello wave. Of the future, and this really kind of
created this demand. And another era we're using jello showed
opulence because we were entering the time of refrigeration. As
(26:16):
the United States enters this industrial boom, the world of
two point five kids, a car in every garage, and
endless suburbs, people wanted to keep up with the Joneses
and one of the best ways to do it was
to have the latest appliance. Right is similar to microwave cooking.
(26:39):
A little bit later in history, people wanted to have refrigerators.
And if you were bringing a jellous salad to the
pot luck or to the party that I don't know,
the kid's birthday party, of the barbecue, it showed that
you and your family had one of those new fangled refrigerators.
And we cannot, we cannot overestimate Mrs Cook's effect on
(27:02):
the demand for jello. Food. Historian James Beard observed in
his in his book American Cookery that Mrs Cook's victory
at the World's Fair unleashed a demand for congealed salads that,
according to Beard, this is the nineteen seventy two He says,
this a demand for congealed salads that has grown alarmingly,
(27:23):
particularly in the suburbs, alarmingly the invasion of the jello mold.
He went on, as well, he did, he couched it.
He went on to say, quote, the jellied salad does
have its delights, though, and it is without question an
American innovation, no doubt about it. Mr Beard here here.
So now we've we've set the stage. We've got knocks,
(27:45):
we've got jello. We've got people nowadays arguing that you
can follow American social history by looking at the history
of jello ass And now we haven't really talked about
this much, but there was a whole kind of iconography
associated with jello packaging. Some of early ones used illustrations
by Norman Rockwell, right. And then there was what was
it been, the jello girl, sort of like a spokes thing,
(28:08):
introduced in nineteen o eight and instrumental, crucial in making
American consumers connect the idea of jello with again the purity,
the innocence of childhood. And although sales of sugar and
you know, therefore, jello were rationed during World War One.
(28:30):
Between the twenties and thirties, the popularity of gelatin salads
sores and there were pragmatic reasons behind this. The depression
forced homemakers to stretch ingredients as far as possible. That
also included things like sugar that you would have separately
in many recipes require you to add sugar. You didn't
(28:50):
have to do that when you're using jello because the
sugar was already part of the mix. Yeah, that's that's
a really good point. And so now we see not
just the idea of refrigeration that comes into plate later,
but we also see the idea of status, of proving
to your friends and neighbors that you can still do
some top notch entertaining despite the rations, despite the shortages.
(29:13):
I've got a recipe for all of relish, which I've
been a savior, the savior the trouble here, folks, it
seems kind of gross. Olives, pickles, celery, and vinegar all
in a lovely, a lovely amalgamation with lime jello. Right right,
But but now we see kind of a Bernesian, if
(29:35):
I could use that word, bern Asian approach to marketing here,
or and aspect of it, because we have to ask ourselves,
did people genuinely like this stuff or did they instead
like being people who could make it. Well, it's like
I said, with my mom and the gentleman salad. Her
mom would have come from that original time where this
(29:57):
was something that was seen as a status symbol, and
she was all about these statas symbols. That's where my
mom got the whole idea of having a lovely table
place setting. It was all very very important during times
where things were much more scarce to show that you
were kind of above the fray. I guess. I mean
it seems a little, I don't know, a little shallow
to me personally, but I can see how it would
(30:19):
have felt important to kind of keep your spirits up
and to make your family feel like you had you know,
you were one of the halves. I guess um. But
of course, like things do, these these kind of jello
salad aspect meat monstrosities fell out of favor and jello
kind of took its was its original place as an
(30:41):
easy to make dessert. You had Bill Cosby swooping in,
you know, back when he wasn't persona non grata, uh,
advertising Jello jigglers. Remember, Jello jigglers was for kids. They
used like a little cookie cutter and they were a
little they used a little bit stiffer gelatine, I think,
so you could pick them up and play with them.
They wanted a gritty reboot. You're absolutely right. By the
(31:03):
nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, the golden age of Jello
had sort of passed. And that's why in nine six
they decided to rebrand. They got Bill Cosby, phenomenally successful
comic at the time. Uh. And it was sort of
the world made new because Americans were no longer as
readily familiar with the concept of aspects. And if you
(31:28):
had brought a perfection salad or a couple of other
really choice gentatsin dishes that will probably read off at
the end. If you brought those to a potluck in
the seventies or eighties, people would be like, what are
you doing? I thought we were friends. Why why can't
you just tell me you don't like me? Exactly? Yeah,
it's sort of like bringing someone a fruitcake for Christmas.
(31:49):
Oh yeah, we did do an episode and the oldest fruitcake,
remember that. And it goes back to that that question
you asked earlier, Ben, Did people really like the way
this stuff tasted or was it just like the placebo
effect of kind of associating it with status, and therefore
you could choke it down. Um. I like all kinds
of stuff, Ben, I'm a relatively adventurous eater, but literally
(32:10):
every single one of these things seems absolutely inedible and
disgusting to me. And I don't think I could ever
convince myself otherwise, you know. Yeah, but we also have
to remember that that numerous folks in the audience wrote
back about vinegar pie, and you were all absolutely correct.
I'm kind of converted. Oh it sounds great, but I'm
(32:31):
not gonna try and tell you what I'm not gonna try.
Let's let's read off some these gross recipes, all right,
So Emerald cantle ope is not that bad. You put lime,
jello and can pineapple on the candle. It's fun. Yeah,
it's fun. It fills the is it, It fills the gap.
There's another one with a with a melon. You can
do that kind of You cut a half a melon
in half and and you put jello in the in
(32:51):
the hole and that you know, you can scoop it out,
so it's sort of like a double texture for your money.
Tell you what, though, Salmon and cottage cheese with boiled
eggs as a garnish, No, sir, No, I'm just thoted
to a jelly lamb salad. No has a pass. I
know we talked about lime jelly salads, but do we
talk about lime cheese salad? Nope? Do you want to
(33:15):
skip that with? Oh? I you know, I do have
that that I think is a modern example of this
actually working and and for me personally, Um, there is
a place here in Atlanta called the Spotted Trotter that
makes their own pattas, and a lot of pattas will
have a little layer of aspect on the top, so
it's just like a small layer of like a ginger aspect,
(33:36):
so that it's made with like a consumer of beef broth,
but it's flavored with ginger and when it's almost like
a jelly or a chutney of some kind. So it's
really good for like you know, mixing with a pat
or putting on a piece of toast or something like that.
It sort of mixes the savory with the sweet. But
to me, it's when you really go full board down
that you know, savory jello thing. That's just it's just
(33:59):
I like it maybe as like a garnish or as
an additive, but you know, all on its own. Oh boy,
and the photography and some of these cookbooks, it's just
like who gave the green light to that picture? You know.
We invite you to check these out firsthand and send
us some of your favorites and favorite here is a
(34:19):
tricky word. It can be the one that you were
most fascinated by or the one you have actually tried.
We we, of course, they're not knocking anybody's personal taste.
You can send us that stuff too ridiculous at how
stuff works dot com or hit us up on the
social media the Facebook, the Instagram. We are also Ridiculous History.
As always, we'd like to thank our super producer Casey
(34:42):
Pegram as well as author Maria tri Marchie, who wrote
Ridiculous History. What's for Dinner? Meet Jello available on how
Stuff works dot com. Also thanks to our pal Alex
Williams for composing our theme um and most importantly, thanks
to you guys for tuning in and hanging out with
us for another episode of Ridiculous History. We'll see you
next time.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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