A Social History of Jell-O Salad (2023)

I just found this... abomination ... by searching "salmon lemon jello."

https://cookpad.com/us/recipes/13792686-salmon-in-gelatin

No thank you.

Would all those savory recpies use sweet jello? Or was it a plain lemon flavored jello?

Just curious, why do you listen to Jack Benny? Job? Hobby/personal interest?

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

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.

America's Test Kitchen is better, in my opinion. Well worth the subscription cost.

I like them and The Spruce. They're owned by the same company, now...

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/

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.

In the early 90s, my High School served "Power Jello". The cafeteria workers told us they used orange juice instead of water.

That salad is beyond anything I have imagined.

>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.

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

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.

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.