'Jiggle!' cookbook brings gelatin into the 21st century

Once upon a time, a holiday table wasn’t complete without a Jell-o salad. But the dish has fallen out of fashion in more recent years.

That’s where Judith Choate and Peter DiMario come in. Their new cookbook “Jiggle!” aims to bring the fun of gelatin back to the mainstream. The book includes a range of recipes for sweet, savory and layered gelatin dishes. Plus, of course, there are Jell-o shots, elevated by mixing in fresh ingredients and flavorful liqueurs.

DiMario says he started experimenting with gelatin during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The aesthetic quality of Jell-o first appealed to him, he says.

“I was really curious to play with color and shapes and how to suspend things in the gelatin and make it look beautiful,” DiMario says. “It just kind of spiraled. I started to realize that I could make really beautiful flavors.”

Traditional Jell-o salads of the 1970s often included savory ingredients, from ham to cottage cheese. While DiMario says that he and his co-author tried to create unique recipes that hadn’t been done before while honoring some of the classics. A recipe in “Jiggly” for a savory gelatin dish includes leeks, potatoes and salmon.

“We really wanted to make sure that it wasn't all just the standard sweet gelatins that people are familiar with,” DiMario says. “The challenge there was, how do you take some of those old recipes and flavors and modernize them for today's palette?”

By Peter DiMario and Judith Choate