In ‘Joys of Jell-O,’ There’s Nothing You Can’t Do With Colored Gelatin

There are two types of Americans: those who have bitten into a quivering, jiggling cube of Jell-O only to discover that the glob of white stuff on top is not, in fact, Cool Whip but mayonnaise, and those who have not.

The first group takes a strange pride in their adventures into the dark heart of American cuisine. It’s also possible that they are exaggerating its horrors in order to elicit a stronger grossed-out reaction from the second group. It almost always works, especially when they bring up the mayonnaise.

I am part of the second group. But last year, my cousin Jenny generously passed on to me a copy of Joys of Jell-O, an illustrated pamphlet she’d found in a thrift store. It was produced in 1962 by General Foods, the company that then owned Jell-O, and was intended to show the housewives of America all the exciting things they could prepare with colored gelatin: parfaits and pies, jiggly rings with bowls of other food in the middle, and, most spectacularly, tiered molds with fruit and vegetable salads magically suspended inside. The color photos were pretty, in an uncanny sort of way. The black and white ones looked suspicious. Either way, it was indeed hard to tell whether the white globs were Cool Whip or mayonnaise.

I can understand Jell-O fascination — up to a point. Fluffy foods like Bavarian creams and chiffon pies need stabilizers if you don’t want them to collapse into a gooey mess. And aspics have a long and noble tradition: In medieval times, they were used to simultaneously preserve food, serve as banquet centerpieces, and show that the host had the means to pay someone to spend an entire day boiling calves’ feet and then straining, clarifying, and molding the resulting mixture. (The Facebook group Show Me Your Aspics and Instagram feed @adventuresinjelly demonstrate the potential of aspic as an art form.) In 20th-century America, Jell-O served similar functions, or at least proved that the family was wealthy enough to afford a refrigerator.

But Joys of Jell-O also includes a recipe for something called Ring Around the Tuna, described as “a beautiful jewel-like entree salad for your luncheon and buffet table.” It contains grated onion, vinegar, celery, cucumber, pimientos, stuffed olives, and yes, canned tuna, all suspended in a ring of lime Jell-O. It’s part of an entire chapter of salads that combines an array of canned vegetables, piquant condiments, and seafood with mayonnaise (or cottage cheese!) encased in lemon or lime Jell-O and served on a decorative leaf of lettuce.

How was this possible? Yes, the past is another country and all of that, but... had midcentury America lost its collective mind?

Jell-O scholarship is broad and wide-ranging. It encompasses not just the expected fields of chemistry, food history, and marketing, but also anthropology, sociology, medicine, rabbinic law, and literature. Cultural critics like to use Jell-O as a metaphor for modern American life.

“It appears an exotic mass that no one can categorize with confidence,” Wendy Wall, a professor of Shakespearean literature, writes in Gastronomica. “Is it an animal product? Dessert? Salad? Fruit? Play toy? While for many Jell-O is an emblem of cultural blandness, it is for others a supple storehouse of fantasies. Jell-O thus offers a profound paradox: it is nothing but potential awaiting the hand of an almost magical maker.”

How can you not find significance in the fact that a mold of lime Jell-O gives off an EEG reading almost identical to that of a human brain? Or that a more dense preparation of Jell-O has the same consistency of human muscle tissue and can be used to test the efficacy of bullets? Or that Dana Gioia, the General Foods executive responsible for the Jell-O Jiggler, was also a poet and later chair of the National Endowment for the Arts?

Of even greater significance: The U.S. is the only country where people have ever consumed Jell-O with enthusiasm — or at least the only one where people bought large quantities of it. “Its status suggests, first of all, that the global economy will not convert world foodways to this perhaps most American taste,” writes Susan Grove Hall in her essay “The Protean Character of Jello [sic], Icon of Food and Identity.” “As an actual food, Jell-O reflects American provincialism and at least a degree of isolation.”

It’s fitting that the food most synonymous with 20th-century American culture was invented right before the turn of the century, in 1897 in LeRoy, New York. No one is sure of the exact reason why its inventor, Pearle Wait, thought the world needed a brightly colored fruit-flavored gelatin dessert. Wait, a carpenter by trade and a tinkerer by inclination, liked to mix up patent medicine, so it’s possible Jell-O was originally intended as a cough syrup or maybe a laxative (Jell-O is still said to be good for sore throats). Sugar cures all ills! What could be more American than that? Wait’s wife, May, named the invention Jell-O.

Two years later, Wait sold the business to Orator Woodward, another LeRoy tinkerer who already owned the similarly-named Grain-O. (Price: $450, or $16,200 today. Regret: probably eternal.) In his book The Great Gelatin Revival, the food historian Ken Albala points out that Jell-O thrives in periods of technological innovation, and this was a particularly heady time. Powdered gelatin had been invented a few years earlier by the Knox company, and chemists were going wild with artificial dyes and flavorings and reconstituted foods. The future had arrived!

It would take a few decades for American palates to adjust to artificial flavors, writes Laura Shapiro in her history Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America. Many powdered products failed along the way because they didn’t taste like the “real thing.” But in the case of Jell-O, there had never been a real thing. The only limit to its power was the imagination of the average American housewife.

To help these housewives along, Woodward began distributing cookbooks to show them all the exciting things they could do with Jell-O. The company also found a potential market in the country’s newest arrivals: From the 1910s until as late as the 1950s, Carolyn Wyman recounts in Jell-O: A Biography, Jell-O graciously provided samples for immigrants on their way to America and at Ellis Island. “It was a square piece of Jell-O and as the ship was moving the Jell-O was wiggling,” one German immigrant remembered. “I was really frightened by this piece of orange Jell-O.” Later, anthropologists measured degrees of assimilation by how often immigrants brought Jell-O molds to community potlucks.

For the benefit of these immigrants, Jell-O’s cookbooks were translated into French, German, Spanish, and, after some frantic consultation with a team of rabbis to make sure Jell-O could be considered kosher, Yiddish. According to Wyman, traveling salesmen would leave the pamphlets at every house in town and then inform the local grocer that there was about to be a big run on Jell-O.

Thanks to these cookbooks, Americans learned that Jell-O could help reduce their caloric intake, expand the meager contents of their fridges into a full meal by encasing it all in a mold of lime Jell-O, get around World War II-era sugar rationing, and serve a nice homemade dessert without having to turn on the oven or undergo the terrifying process of rolling out pie crust. Not everyone was fortunate enough to have this marvelous “dessert insurance”: Jell-O’s Cold War-era marketing tried to generate pity for Soviet housewives who, in the event of an emergency dinner party, had no access to a quick and easy dessert.

Joys of Jell-O first appeared in 1961 and was updated annually throughout the ’60s. It was intended for Jell-O fans: To get a copy, you had to send in some combination of cash and pictures from Jell-O cartons. For another dollar and a few more Jell-O cartons, you could also order aluminum or “copper-tone” molds even though, technically, you could prepare Jell-O in any ordinary pan or bowl. But this was what Smithsonian magazine called “the Baroque period of gelatin masterworks.” It was important to keep up!

Joys of Jell-O was not a rare cult object: By 1966, Wyman writes, 2 million Americans had ordered copies. In 1968, the average American household bought 16 packages of Jell-O per year. This would turn out to be the peak of Jell-O consumption. But the effects would be lingering: Ask anybody who grew up in the ’80s, and they’ll probably be able to dredge up a few Jell-O memories for you. Here’s mine from sometime in early elementary school: getting reprimanded for bouncing a square of red Jell-O on my desk. I liked watching it plop.

As a general rule, according to anthropologists, Jell-O has historically been most popular in rural areas, such as the upper Midwest, that were late to get electricity and refrigeration. That’s because more people remember a time when Jell-O still seemed wondrous, which explains why Jell-O memories often feature grandparents. (Utah, where Jell-O is the official state snack, is a whole other story. As are Jell-O shots.)

This context was all very entertaining, but none of it explained Ring Around the Tuna. Or Barbecue Salad, “a tangy tomato salad or aspic that’s excellent as a relish or a salad.” (Actual ingredients: tomato sauce, vinegar, salt, pepper, Worcestershire sauce, and lemon Jell-O. Mayonnaise optional.) Who ate this stuff? The introduction to Joys of Jell-O claims much of the inspiration for the booklet came from the people themselves, “housewives [who] liked it so much, they turned their imaginative attention to Jell-O [and] invented all sorts of ingenious recipes using it.” However, the holdings of General Foods were vast. Some of Jell-O’s corporate siblings were called out by name: Birds Eye frozen foods, Baker’s Angel Flake coconut. Is it possible that there was some behind-the-scenes dealing with the tuna industry?

Or maybe people just never got around to the salads section of the book. It was in the back, after all, after desserts and “two-way recipes,” which were also sweet but sometimes included mayo, so they could be used as side salads.

I started asking around for recommendations from Joys of Jell-O. I received enthusiastic endorsements for desserts, including Orange-Mallow Ring (oranges and mini marshmallows in orange Jell-O) and Crown Jewel Dessert (colorful chunks of Jell-O mixed with whipped cream fortified with lemon Jell-O in a graham cracker crust). There were a few mayonnaise horror stories. My partner belatedly recalled eating savory Jell-O sometime in his childhood, but a call to his mom revealed that it had actually been clear Knox gelatin, which made it an aspic. But no tuna in lime Jell-O, except for a couple of people on the Internet who had tried it as a stunt.

Two young friends, ages 13 and 7, and their parents agreed to try savory Jell-O with me. The kids had only the vaguest notions of Jell-O and were both fascinated and repulsed by the idea of jiggly food. The 13-year-old had one condition: no tuna. (Her father seconded.)

So I brought over Barbecue Salad instead, plus Orange-Mallow Ring and Crown Jewel Dessert because I didn’t want to totally gross everyone out. We ate it with an appropriately midcentury meal prepared by the kids’ father: pot roast, steamed green beans, and roasted potatoes.

I’d put the Barbecue Salad in the only two silicon molds I happen to own, both extremely inappropriate: Hanukkah dreidels and a sleeping baby. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get them to retain their shapes. Instead we had four salmon-pink lumps of various sizes studded with smaller, whiter lumps of mayonnaise. “Don’t put that near me!” the 13-year-old warned, covering her eyes dramatically (though she did lick some from the very tip of her fork). The 7-year-old tentatively jiggled the plate, but otherwise refused to touch it.

I kind of wanted to do that, too, but as an adult, I was obligated to try it without excess dramatics. It wasn’t the vomit-inducing concoction I had been bracing myself for. It was cold and slimy, but it tasted like ketchup. “But airier,” said one of the adults. “And not as sticky,” added another. I smeared some on a roasted potato. It was okay. But I also feel obligated to report that no one finished their portion or asked for seconds.

We all liked the desserts much better. The 7-year-old remained suspicious of the texture, but he ate both the Orange-Mallow Ring and the Crown Jewel Dessert. “This tastes like Fruity Pebbles,” the 13-year-old announced after taking a spoonful of Crown Jewel Dessert. “You’ve never had Fruity Pebbles,” her mother reminded her. “It tastes like Fruity Pebbles look,” she amended. This was not a complaint, although everyone at the table agreed they would have preferred chocolate. But still! A cheap and novel dessert!

And after all of that, I still don’t understand the power Jell-O held over 20th-century Americans. Yes, it was easier to prepare Crown Jewel Dessert than it was to make a cake or a pie, but with all the chilling, it took much longer. It didn’t taste any better, and it wasn’t pretty.

The only conclusion I can come to — and it’s a chilling one, no pun intended — is that no one is above being susceptible to a food fad. After all, we are people who eat Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and plant-based meat. Our descendants will quiver in horror. Maybe they will even have themed dinner parties and pretend they’re on TikTok.

Aimee Levitt is a freelance writer in Chicago. Read more of her work at aimeelevitt.com.