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I'm surprised the Jack Benny Show isn't mentioned. It was frequently the most popular radio show and it was sponsored by Jell-O from 1934 - 1942. During every episode ( at least every one that I've listened to) the announcer Don Wilson would do a commercial for Jell-O with a new salad recipe, usually the format was something like "What could be sadder than a spring bride who doesn't know what to make for desert? For tonight, try {cutesy salad name}." The recipe would follow. I remember in particular one that had Salmon and Lemon Jell-O.
Jack and Mary's recipe book was published in 1937 chock full of Jell-O salad recipes. I have a copy here, it's delightful.
This page has a more detailed history
https://www.otrr.org/FILES/Articles/Danny_Goodwin_Articles/J...
More pictures of the recipe book
https://exhibitions.lib.udel.edu/jell-o/home/capturing-the-m....
I just found this... abomination ... by searching "salmon lemon jello."
https://cookpad.com/us/recipes/13792686-salmon-in-gelatin
No thank you.
I think hot dog jello may be even more hideous.
trigger warning next time!
Would all those savory recpies use sweet jello? Or was it a plain lemon flavored jello?
Sweet sugery Jello. I don't think "Jell-O" made non-sweet versions at the time.
Just curious, why do you listen to Jack Benny? Job? Hobby/personal interest?
Because he's funny as hell.
I don't think people realize how entertaining the old radio shows were. It's all fallen out of the collective consciousness, but Jack Benny was as funny as anything on TV today. "X-1" is better scifi than anything on today - it benefitted from running during the golden age of scifi. "Gunsmoke" was great, "The Six Shooter" starring Jimmy Stewart was wonderful.
They used to play on LA radio stations after midnight, I started listening to them on college and never stopped.
Because no Jello recipes on Fibber McGee and Molly
Tangential, but Serious Eats is one of my favorite food websites on the internet. In an ocean of crappy SEO recipe blogs overstuffed with generic photos and unnecessary backstories, Serious Eats has a deep collection of well-explained and high-quality free recipes (and articles like this one).
I would happily pay some kind of premium membership, but there doesn't appear to be such an option.
Unfortunately ever since it was sold the quality has gone way downhill. The main content producers are gone, and the SEO is on the rise. Recipes are getting modified and/or disappearing.
It’s still the case that I often start by searching “kenji DISH” or “gritzer DISH” but it’s an artifact of the past. In terms of gonforeard content it is a dead site, and one where they seem to want to slowly undo the past
That's disappointing. I saw it was sold recently, but I was hoping it was one of those sales where things mostly continue as usual.
Serious Eats is definitely declining in quality.
I loved Kenji and BraveTart, but both of them have left the site. There is still a huge archive of good material, and there are contributors that I still like. Today, I mostly follow Kenji's YouTube channel, and I subscribe to America's Test Kitchen which has plenty of good recipes.
I get why Kenji went to video, and more power to him. Unfortunately for me, I just hate getting video content, and will almost never watch that sort of thing. I'm a text person.
So for the most part Kenji's online content has dropped off the face of the map for my own usage. He does contribute to cooking.nytimes.com so I'll get some of his newer recipes there.
I had no idea Kenji was no longer associated with Serious Eats. What a shame! Probably time to go archive my favorite articles and recipes.
Kenji's YouTube channel is a great consolation prize, though - I just discovered it recently and it's become a fast favorite.
America's Test Kitchen is better, in my opinion. Well worth the subscription cost.
While we're on this topic, Kimball's 177milkstreet is one of my more frequent sources for recipes. Moreso than ATK/Cooks Country.
I like them and The Spruce. They're owned by the same company, now...
Brings to mind James Lileks' "Gallery of Regrettable Food", https://lileks.com/institute/gallery/. I was born in 1960, so missed most of these delights - I suspect they mostly tailed off by the mid-60s. But, yeah, I remember some of the recipe cards my mom had from the 50s and early 60s were pretty frightening.
Edit: and, of course, the Gallery is linked early in the article. Yes, I commented before reading. Sorry. It is worth a read!
My family [from Georgia] used this https://www.tastesoflizzyt.com/fluff-jello-salad/ and it was literally called "this" salad, as in "is she bringing 'this'?" I recall both green and red flavors, and I believe it had pineapple chunks in it. It was almost certainly made with Cool Whip, not cream cheese
While I can recall the solid jello as pictured appearing at gatherings, the fluff version was by far the most common preparation of jello growing up
The Nebraska side of my family used to make "broken glass jello," which was essentially translucent Jello in an opaque gelatin.[0] (So gelatin in gelatin.)
That and Dorothy Lynch salad dressing[1] and runzas[2] are what I most remember about our trips up north. With this kind of food, it's a surprise that my grandparents lived as long as they did, but it was good living.
0: https://bellyfull.net/broken-glass-jello/ 1: https://www.dorothylynch.com/products/home-style 2: https://houseofnasheats.com/runzas/
Runzas are just Cornish pasties, i think. Unless I'm missing something?
Runzas look awesome!
That and other Jell-O salads were a main feature of our extended family get-together potlucks in rural farming Oregon. It might've been the most common dish to bring.
The fluff was usually red, occasionally green, and sometimes layered with non-fluff Jell-O. Both forms would usually have fruit embedded in them, sparsely, and usually diced small.
We never ate Jell-O at home (in the city, Portland), so I sometimes wondered whether Jell-O salads were a quirk of the Dutch-American farmers side of our family.
Growing up a thousand miles north of Georgia, I can confirm that "Jello Salad" was a tub of cottage cheese, a tub of cool whip, a can of crushed pineapple, and a packet of red or green Jello.
Ambrosia salad is very similar. Usually has coconut or marshmallows in there as well.
In the early 90s, my High School served "Power Jello". The cafeteria workers told us they used orange juice instead of water.
I grew up Mormon in Utah and I don't recall seeing a savory Jell-O salad at any functions I ever attended.
Sweet "salads," usually served as side dishes, are very common, though. My favorite, which doesn't actually include Jell-O, is my mom's frog-eye salad. It's made up of acini di pepe pasta, whipped cream (preferably Cool Whip), and pineapple chunks, mixed with a sauce of pineapple juice thickened with eggs and flour. Yum!
That salad is beyond anything I have imagined.
As a child of the '80's, it intrigues me that a cookbook from 1960 included a recipe for "Molded Avocado and Tuna". I don't recall avocados being popular until the late nineties or early aughts. At least not in southwestern Ohio.
This raises the question: was there a previous period of avocado popularity, or was this one of those recipes included in a cookbook with unobtanium ingredients that no regular home cook ever makes?
>was there a previous period of avocado popularity,
I suspect it was regional, and as you observed, Ohio (and the Midwest in general) was not one of the regions 40+ years ago.
At my (Midwestern) college radio station in the 1970s, we used to get PSAs (public service announcements) to read from the California Avocado Advisory Board[0,1] touting the fruit, sometimes they were mocked regarding what kind of advice we give to avocados.
I recall my first direct experience with an avocado wasn't until I moved to California some years later.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Avocado_Commission#...
[1] at the above link, you can read about how a Sunset magazine cover featuring avocado dish played a role in popularizing avocado across the nation in the 1970s
I liked the recipe from an earlier time edition of Joy of Cooking that used turtle eggs that are now from a protected species. I never tried it, mind you.
People would have known about them at least as avocado was a popular interior decorating color in the late 60s and 70s.
In general the food of that era was sweet and bland, so often recipes like this were just to give the reader a sense of excitement, rather than something likely to actually be made.
I remember reading the book "The Man Who Saved Britain" [0] (a history of Bond novels & movies) and the author was describing some of the exotic foods, such as an avocado, being something the readers were unlikely to experience in a world of currency controls and import restrictions. One thing that pops up in that book is why the package tour industry was invented and how it applied to Goldfinger.
My suspicion is that some of those "exotics" appeared only in novels and the cookbook authors never expected their readers to ever be able to make the items.
0 - https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Saved-Britain-Disturbing/dp/0...
If you can't find metal stucco lath, use carbon fiber stucco lath!
I recall a cookbook from the 1970's that lists such exotic delicacies as avocadoes, mangoes and chile peppers. From the presentation it was clear that these were possibly expensive, but one could find them, especially in large cities.
I was eating avocado, sprouts and Muenster cheese sandwiches since the early 70’s. This was in Florida. Could be produce shipping made them more viable up north by the 90’s.
Avocados were definitely a known dessert treat back in 1970s Australia.
I would say moulded foods in general have fallen out of fashion, Christmas pudding aside, and not counting things like cake tins & pie dishes as 'moulded foods'... which I suppose gets somewhat arbitrary, but there's definitely a certain hard to define (use of gelatin or similar setting agent?) style of moulding (blanc mange, jelly, pates) which seems out of vogue.
then why not just say moulded gelatin foods have fallen out of style? with all of the modern baking shows and baking adjacent game shows, moulding food is still all the rage.
there's a lot of "food" that as fallen out of style as we've come to accept that it wasn't really food to begin with. the crap my parent and my grandparents were told was food was the the beginnings of the corp take over of food so that they were actually just food products. things like jello, margarine, cool whip, and similar are the top things that for me personally have been completely removed from my diet but were staples previously
> then why not just say moulded gelatin foods have fallen out of style?
Because that isn't what I said or meant but just a parenthetical suggestion at what a better definition might be when I realised that it worked for the three examples that came immediately to mind and that I listed?
> with all of the modern baking shows and baking adjacent game shows
I explicitly excepted cake tins and pie dishes and the like, I don't think of that as 'moulding' and I don't think most people do either.
https://www.instagram.com/70sdinnerparty/ - Fantastic IG account. Pretty wild what people did/ate in the 70s - lots of weird jell-o stuff, heh. :)
My parents were the Romeo and Juliette of green jello salad, bringing together both the "cherried" and "non-cherried" varieties. Whenever all of my grandparents were together they would each present their varieties to the grandchildren as the best option. (Spoiler alert: They all grossed us out.)
The amino acid profile of gelatin is much better than the profile of steak. Gelatin is an incomplete protein that has more of the simple anti-stress amino acids (glycine and proline mainly) than excitatory amino acids (tryptophan).
Soup stock made from chicken carcasses or the beef knuckle bones will gel, like gelatin. The anti-stress aminos are why people have traditionally made soup to feed to sick family members.
Great Lakes Gelatin makes good versions of gelatin and collagen protein powders: https://greatlakeswellness.com/products/beef-gelatin-single-...
Last month I used the chat feature to ask about where the amino acid profiles had gone on their website. I was told they were switching the labeling/packaging from the former "supplement facts" to "nutrition facts". I presume this was motivated so people can buy this food product with food stamps (SNAP), but I didn't ask and they didn't volunteer.
I've worked in the supplement industry, so while I'm not a FDA labeling expert I've been through several audits and provided support to the QC/QA team during an audit. Applying a supplement facts panel instead of a nutrition facts panel requires very different QC processes, and depending on the food the testing requirements will be very different. I'd assume a big reason they switched is that the testing for a specific amino acid would be more expensive than a protein assay, plus since it's an animal product there would be a wider variability batch to batch and so might have caused issues with lot regularity under a supplement regime.
Or it could be a straight marketing thing, having a supplement facts panel was causing consumer confusion/concern.
My mom made a labor-intensive dessert she called "broken window cake." It had small cubes of different flavors of Jello suspended in a sweet, whitish sponge cake-like substance. I loved it.
On a tangent, did you get birthday cakes with pennies in it?
edit:
Huh, seems to be primarily a Canadian thing. Weird:
https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/172r37c/coins_in_birt...
Mine were wrapped in waxed paper too.
> there wasn't much the food industry could do to repel a nation that was already stirring chopped tomatoes and pickles into strawberry Jell-O for a Red Crest Salad
Oh no! Has anyone ever tasted this dish? Is it as disgusting as it sounds?