When Mrs. John E. Cooke entered a recipe contest sponsored by Knox Gelatine in 1905, she set
expectations high: The New Castle, Pennsylvania, resident dubbed her submission “perfection
salad.” Whether or not it lived up to the name depends on your taste. It featured common
salad ingredients like chopped cabbage, red peppers, and celery, all suspended in a gelatinous
package. To serve it, Cook recommended scooping the squishy concoction into hollowed-out bell
peppers.
Perfection salad didn’t win the top prize, but it was hardly a failure. The panel of
judges, which included Boston Cooking-School Cook Book author Fannie Farmer, awarded Mrs.
Cook third place and sent her home with a hundred dollar prize. And that was just the
beginning of the dish’s success. Though modern diners may think perfection salad stretches
the definitions of both perfection and salad, it turned out to be exactly what Americans
were craving at a pivotal moment in history. And speaking of craving, I am particularly
NOT craving a bite of this horrifying concoction, the Ring Around the Tuna from 1962’s Joys
of Jello. But, for you all, I will try it. Oh boy this is gonna be bad.
Hi, I’m Justin Dodd. Welcome to Food History. Though it occasionally appears at church potlucks
and Thanksgiving celebrations, Jell-O salad is largely considered a relic of a bygone
era. It’s hard to believe that half a century ago the dish was seen as an elegant addition
to any dinner spread. But before I get into the decline of Jell-O salad, let’s start
at the recipe’s not-so-humble beginnings.
Gelatin was a delicacy in pre-Industrial Europe. To make it, cooks boiled ingredients like
animal bones and tendons for hours, strained the liquid, and waited for a jelly-like substance
to congeal on the surface. This gel was made from collagen, the proteins that provide structure
to connective tissues in the body. The cartilage connecting bones contains a lot of collagen,
which is why animal bones are a common source of the ingredient in cooking.
Because drawing collagen out of bones is such a slow, labor-intensive process, only the
wealthiest homes with fully-staffed kitchens had the resources to make gelatin outside
of special occasions. These households made the most of it by molding gelatin into impressive
structures called aspics that encased other components.
Dishes became even more
elaborate as the centuries progressed. In the 18th century, famous French chef Marie-Antoine
Carême brought gelatin to Napoleon's imperial court. His
aspics included fine ingredients such as truffles, sweetbreads, and calves’ tongues.
As is the case with many French foods, Thomas Jefferson is credited with introducing gelatin
to America. And as is the case with roughly all of those foods, it’s not true. There
are recipes in the colonies for calves’ foot jellies decades before Jefferson started
talking about them.
But Jefferson was a fan of jellied dishes. He had developed a taste for the unique texture
while living overseas, and he had his enslaved chef, James Hemings, recreate it back home
in Virginia. Hemmings used the formal culinary training he received during Jefferson’s
diplomatic mission to France to make a wine jelly flavored with lemon, sugar, and nutmeg.
Jefferson reportedly loved gelatinous dishes so much that he considered renaming his famous
plantation Montijello. OK, that one's not true, but in my defense: I’m an idiot.
As wealthy Americans started serving aspics at dinner parties, scientists were working
to bring gelatin to the masses. Made from the parts of livestock many people throw away,
gelatin had the potential to be a cheap protein source. It was the process of preparing it
that required valuable time and labor most families couldn’t afford to spare.
American engineer Peter Cooper offered a solution to this conundrum when he secured a patent
for the world’s first powdered gelatin in 1845. His product consisted of dried-up granules
that could be reconstituted with water at home. Packages of Peter Cooper’s Gelatin
were cheap, and turning it into something edible took a fraction of the time required
to make the stuff from scratch.
Cooper's patent called for dissolving powdered gelatin in hot water and chilling the liquid
to set it in a mold—not too different from what Jell-O makers do today. After processing
gelatin, manufacturers slice up the substance and dry it. Once the product has been dehydrated,
it’s ground into a fine powder.
The special chemical properties of gelatin make it possible for home cooks to turn flavored
powder into a jiggly dessert in the shape of their choice. At room temperature, collagen,
which is what gelatin is made from, consists of a bunch of triple helices. These helixes
consist of three strands of amino acids, called polypeptide chains, wrapped around one another,
with weak bonds holding them together. When boiling water is poured over dried gelatin
these bonds dissolve and the helices fall apart, leaving a puddle of loose polypeptide
chains.
Adding cold water to the liquid and chilling it in the fridge rebuilds the bonds and the
triple-helix structure, and any water that was added gets absorbed into the blob. The
chains form a kind of net that catches any excess water in its gaps. The strength of
the triple helix structure combined with these water pockets is what makes Jell-O jiggle
while still holding the shape of the vessel it was set in.
Peter Cooper’s invention could have been a game changer, but there’s evidence that
it never really caught on. In 1893, Philadelphia Cooking School teacher Sarah Tyson Rorer wrote
a letter to the Knox Company asking them to create "the very same product" Cooper had
already come up with, according to Carolyn Wyman’s Jell-O: A Biography. So it’s pretty
clear that powdered gelatin hadn’t quite conquered the market.
Cooper’s patent had expired by then, and Knox did make their own version of the product—their
unflavored powdered gelatin is still sold today, in fact. Other manufacturers created
similar products, but it took a couple by the name of Pearle and May Wait to take us
from gelatin to Jell-O. According to The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink, Pearl
“made and sold patent medicines, so he knew how to add colorings and flavorings to prettify
products of unsavory origins—such as the boiled calves feet used to make gelatin.”
May came up with the name Jell-O. She’s also credited with adding fruity flavorings
to the product, likely using syrups originally developed to make the Wait’s medicines more
palatable. After struggling to turn the brand into a successful enterprise, Pearle sold
it to the Genesee Pure Food Company for $450, or roughly $11,000 today. Eventually, they
were able to do what the Waits could not—make Jell-O a household name.
From the beginning, Jell-O was available in a variety of sweet flavors, like strawberry,
orange, raspberry, and lemon. But this didn’t stop people from using it in savory applications
as European chefs had done with aspic in the past. The convenience product was so novel
that homecooks took to using the flavored versions in recipes that called for plain
gelatin alongside lemon juice. This was how Jell-O “salads” that toed the line between
dinner and dessert came to be.
When the Great Depression hit, Jell-O dishes in the style of Mrs. Cook’s perfection salad
became even more popular. In order to feed their families, home cooks couldn’t let
any food go to waste. Popping previously cooked meat and vegetables into a Jell-O mold was
a clever way to both preserve leftovers and repurpose them into new dishes. This frugal
mindset was carried into World War II, when Jell-O salads became a way to stretch rations
into an impressive meal.
The Jell-O craze reached its zenith in the 1950s. During this era, the women in charge
of kitchens were faced with dueling expectations. Advancements in technology led to new appliances
like refrigerators, as well as pre-prepared convenience items like TV dinners, which I
covered in our last episode. This gave middle-class housewives more free hours in the day. At
the same time, the pressure for women to perform the role of the perfect American wife and
mother was greater than ever after World War II and at the start of the Cold War.
At a lecture delivered at Harvard, historian Elizabeth Singer More said, “There was a
universal idea of female primacy in the home for the good of their children and the good
of the nation.” The ideal way for women to serve their country in this time of national
fear was by keeping population levels high in case war broke out with the Soviet Union.
The housewife was also valuable as a symbol. In American propaganda, the country’s domestic
women provided a contrast to the Soviet women who worked in factories while leaving their
children with government daycare workers.
All of this meant that if women did have more time thanks to new technologies, they were
still expected to fill it with household tasks. This led to convenience food items being used
to make home-cooked meals that required more labor than opening a can. Jell-O salad was
a perfect example. It took a processed food—powdered gelatin—and turned it into an elaborate-looking
dish that showcased the cook’s domestic skills. The colorful molds were reminiscent
of the traditional aspics served to presidents and monarchs, but this 20th-century version
was much cheaper and easier to prepare.
Much like the gelatins of the past, Jell-O salads in the 1950s were works of art. The
recipes were all about presentation, and taste was arguably an afterthought. Cream cheese
was sometimes folded into the Jell-O to change its opacity. Ingredients were chosen based
on how they looked suspended in the mold: Fresh strawberry slices and marshmallows were
“floaters,” while canned fruits and fresh grapes were “sinkers.” Floaters and sinkers:
Name a less appetizing duo. And like some kind of unholy birthday cake, Jell-O salad
was often served with a frosting of mayonnaise spread on top.
There was no limit to what went inside a Jell-O salad. One Jell-O ad from the 1950s called
for grated onion, cottage cheese, and fish salad in a lime gelatin mold. Not terribly
dissimilar from this nightmare here, which also features stuffed olives, pimiento peppers,
and canned tuna. *shudders* Eventually, the brand offered alternatives to customers who
didn’t want to mix sweet flavors with seafood. Celery, seasoned tomato, and Italian salad
Jell-O mixes were introduced in the 1960s, but the flavors were short-lived. By the mid-1970s,
Jell-O salads had fallen out of fashion, and the company pulled the savory varieties from
stores to focus on marketing its product as a dessert.
It only took a couple decades for Jell-O salad to go from fancy showstopper to kitschy oddity.
Americans also became more conscious of their sugar intake in the 1970s, and they grew wary
of salads that tasted like candy. By this time, the rigid gender roles that defined
the 1950s had loosened, and more women were entering the workforce. A woman’s value
was no longer tied to how well she layered fish into her Jell-O mold.
Jell-O salad may be mocked in the mainstream, but it’s far from dead. The Mid-Century
Supper Club is one group keeping the dish alive in the form of throwback potlucks.
Since 2008, their dinner parties have showcased
Jell-O molds alongside retro delicacies like shrimp Christmas trees, cocktail weenie towers,
and pickle pinwheel platters. Say that five times fast.
And Jell-O salad isn't limited to themed dinner parties. Many of the recipes that started
on the backs of Jell-O boxes never stopped being family traditions. This is especially
true in parts of the South, Midwest, and Utah, where gelatin is baked into the local cuisine—or
rather, it’s boiled, cooled, and served with a dollop of mayonnaise on top.
If you have an idea for an episode of Food History, drop it in the comments below. And
tell me your own experiences with Jell-O Salad, if you’ve got ‘em. My experience begins
and hopefully ends with the Ring Around the Tuna. Let’s just do this, get this over with.
Bon appetit.
Oh there's so many textures. Wow it's salty.