JMcAndrew sends in this old Beetle Bailey: “I collect vintage advertising and I am very aware of the crimes against humanity committed with aspic Jello salads.”
He also sent in a bit of vintage Jello advertising:
You may wonder about that fish. Fish in Jello? But some years ago your editor worked for a US pet food company, and we wanted to see what pet foods were sold in other countries that we might sell here. One we had shipped in from Australia was “Pilchards in Aspic”, essentially small herrings in a gelatin matrix, sold as a cat food. We passed on this one.
from Wikipedia: “By the 1950s, salads became so popular that Jell-O responded with savory and vegetable flavors such as celery, Italian, mixed vegetable, and seasoned tomato. These flavors have since been discontinued.”
Comics I Don't Understand 
Anybody else here watch Dylan’s Cooking Diaries on YouTube? He uses old cookbooks to try out their recipes, and it’s amusing to see his expressions when he introduces a recipe from the 50s or 60s that uses Jell-0. Most of them I remember from my childhood.
Yikes!! I hadn’t thought of Jello Salads in over 60-65 years. My mom would make them back on the 50s. I can remember the texture (not pleasant), and almost the taste (whatever she favored for the ingredient(s)). I can understand why it’s no longer a ‘thing’!
“Kids, I’ve got a special treat for dessert tonight. Celery Jell-O!”
No thanks. When was the last time you ate Jell-O? I can’t even remember the last time. It was decades ago. I haven’t been in the hospital for decades either. The hospital is the most likely place where you get Jell-O to eat.
We had some Jell-O last year, when my wife had come down with some sort of stomach flu.
Having Bill Cosby as the spokesman for Jello was brilliant. Every commercial he did made it seem like Jello was the greatest dessert in the world. It’s hard to explain to anyone who wasn’t alive at that time just how much people loved Bill Cosby.
Mys sister worked for a local church for a few years. It had a women’s group that would or did at one time compile recipe books contributed by the members. She gave me one from 1957. In the salad section, there were 17 recipes featuring gelatin in some form. This was far and away the most of any type of recipe in the book, let alone salads. Some were okay, some truly mind-boggling. Here is one of those:
Jellied Tuna Fish and Vegetable Salad
1 pkg. lemon jello
1 c. hot water
3/4 c. cold water
2 T. vinegar
pinch of salt
5 hard-boiled eggs, diced
1 can tuna fish, shredded
1 bunch celery, cut fine
1/2 c. mayonnaise
2 pimentos, chopped
1 green pepper, cut fine
1 can peas, drained.
Dissolve jello in hot water, add cold water, vinegar and salt. Let
cool. Add remaining ingredients. Serves 12.
I just try to consider the range of flavors and textures crammed into
this salad. Especially the canned peas. Yeesh. Notice also that it gets
the salad all mixed, but then doesn’t really say how to mold it or how
long to let it set and that sort of relatively important detail.
My mother made Jello in various forms from salads to desserts. My parents have passed, but I still have several boxes of gelatin and dessert mixes. I made some of each relatively recently. One fun memory of my mother were the Easter gelatin salads she’d make by first blowing out the contents of chicken eggs. Then she’d fill each eggshell with gelatin until it set. Then she’d break the molds and set the various flavors of Jello eggs in bowls of green Jello. She may have used plastic molds as well. Lots of work I’m sure, but the “Easter egg baskets” were delightful.
MiB, my mom called the jello with celery ‘salad’. She said we should know it’s salad because of the celery. The jello desserts included (among other things) pineapple, apples, bananas, even orange sections. I don’t think I’ve had jello since then.
I used to make jello with my kids because it was simple and a thing to do. I think we tended to make the jello pudding more than the gelatin (mainly because you didn’t have to wait so long to eat it).
The Gallery of Regrettable Food (one of those old-timey websites that I remember reading decades ago) has a section on similar foods in their “Gel-Cookery” section. (https://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/knox/4.html is a particularly shining example)
Chak –
I bet some of my cookbooks date back long before Dylan’s!
I have cookbooks which are reprints of cookbooks from the 1700s. As mentioned before (ad nauseam I am sure to many) husband and I do 18th century reenacting. When we first joined our unit (a civilian unit not military, but as was done in period – the men had to know how to fight in proper form/lines in case the community was attacked) there were 3 “old ladies” who did the cooking demo (and after the demo the members had it for mid day dinner – no lunch back then in period – cooked mid day dinner, leftovers from same for supper at night and leftovers from same for break fast the next morning – add in as go along if more food is needed, but a good housewife should be able to judge what she needed. I would sit on my rear end and demonstrate period embroidery – occasional helping out with the cooking.
Well, old ladies tend to need to retire from that heavy work and one by one they left the unit. One of the fellows took over – but he was needed elsewhere (head of cannon crew). As THE woman board member I was asked if I knew about the cooking – I knew the theory, but had never really done so, but I said I would cook. I spent the next 10 years or so doing the cooking demo for the unit until someone (male) joined and wanted to cook. So I have some repro books of 18th century cooking and “receipts” as they were called. (And I have cooked several of same at home on the stove for husband and me for dinner.) I tend towards cooking period stews, but have baked in a frying pan adjacent to the fire at events also.
About 5 years ago I was telling someone about this – and it dawned on me that I was now older than the “old ladies” who used to do the cooking were when we joined. And now the unit commander does the cooking – and I help him by watching the pots and talking while he is off “commanding” the men for drills – and I do my embroidering in between.
(We all tend to help out where needed – husband will be demonstrating weaving and then go do the children’s military drill. I will leave my stitching and/or cooking and help by firing the black powder cannon if the crew is short. And so on.)c
The wallpaper in my kitchen (put up by the previous owners) is all reproductions of recipes from some 18th century cookbook or other, complete with the old “long s” and with all the Nouns capitalized, so if I ever need to make Sauce for Roaft Goofe I can just look it up on the wall. The recipe for “Coach Wheels” looks particularly interesting. Basically make a yeast bread dough, roll it out as thin as you can, coat with butter, sugar and cinnamon, roll it up into a tight cylinder, cut slices, let them rise a bit and bake in the oven.
I have mentioned in the past the YouTube channel Early American:
https://www.youtube.com/@EarlyAmerican/videos
Justine prepares various 18th and early 19th Century “receipts”. There’s a second channel, where she and Ron sample and discuss the results.
Mark/Brian – Takes a bit of practice to read the old version of English with modern eyes and not think it strange, but one does learn to do so. One thing which is interesting in old “receipts” is that many times the amount needed is not in regular measurements. (Sort of like a recipe I once read which said to go around the pot twice pouring some spice or such which was being added as the measurement for same – what size pot? how much should be pouring out at a time?
The Coach Wheels sound interesting. I will go searching for them – maybe I can bake them in a Dutch oven over the hot coals (generally not cooking over the fire itself unless a soup, stew, or roast – and roasts are too expensive to cook for the group, but over the hot coals formed by the wood burning in the fire) at an event.
Grawlix – in our modern day to day lives husband and I eat out of order as we generally wake up these days around lunch time and go to bed around 4 am. So our meals are lunch, dinner and late night snack (breakfast replacement) which is usually cereal and a sweet something. Last week husband decided he wanted Jello for the something sweet. I made a package of green Jello with 6 servings- his suggestion – and poured them out into 6 pudding cups which have lids. I put the lids on 4 of them and we had the other two. Next night we had 2 more. Then he decided the following night to have something else. Recently he tossed out over a week later the remaining 2 Jellos – they had not survived. That seems to be the major problem with having Jello – we eat all but the last 2 and those 2 end up being tossed out when they are too old to eat. (Little snack cakes keep much better.)
I do know that there is never leftover when I cooked/cook at events (and I was always being asked to cook again until a replacement cook came along – who wanted to cook) so it must have been edible – either that or no one else really wanted to stand over a fire in mid July in the heat and cook? :-)