Why This 1960s Food Trend Still Doesn’t Make Sense

My mother, who was raised in Texas, used to make a green fruit salad consisting of lemon and lime instant gelatin mixed with cottage cheese, mayonnaise, condensed milk, and crushed pineapple that I adored as a child. My stepmother, who was an Alabama native, made a layered congealed salad for the Fourth of July with packets of strawberry and blueberry instant gelatin, bananas, frozen berries, crushed pecans, and a whole tub of Cool Whip. I called them desserts, and my mother allowed it, but not my stepmother. For her, a gelatin salad was a side dish. To me, a sugary treat next to my Shake n’ Bake chicken felt like a culinary transgression, but I’m also one who refers to cereal, muffins, and granola bars as desserts.

While the jiggly salads I grew up with could pass as sweet courses, there are some recipes that are harder to classify and include things like vegetables and meat set in a sweet, artificially flavored gelatin. Apparently, they were once popular, and one elderly woman once gave me a recipe for a celery and lime Jell-O salad that she promised would get me invited back to every party. Maybe that would have been the case 60 years ago, but these days I’d probably get invited back for questioning. It’s one of the 1960s food trends that still doesn’t make any sense. But savory gelatins feature in many traditional cuisines without requiring cherry-flavored powder. 

Jellied dishes go way back to the Medieval era in Europe, when they were reserved for the elites because they required a lot of labor to prepare — a far departure from the fast food available at the time. My mother had a cookbook that detailed each step with photographs, and it included boiling calves’ feet for hours until the trotters released all their collagen into the liquid. The resulting brew would then be strained repeatedly and clarified with beaten egg whites and sometimes crushed eggshells. If you’ve ever reached into the fridge to get some leftover soup only to find a solid, jiggly block, then you have an idea of what these early gelatins looked like. Creative cooks would set pieces of cooked meats, vegetables, and eggs into this liquid to present at lavish banquets. As refined sugar became more available, sweet gelatin dishes started appearing on noble tables.

It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s that instant gelatin became available to the masses, which made these elite dishes easier to prepare for much less affluent households. 1897 saw the launch of the Jell-O brand in the United States, and its appearance coincided with the obsession over home economics in this country, which prized efficiency, cleanliness, and neatness over taste and quality. While Jell-O was known for its sweetened lemon-flavored gelatin, other companies sold plain gelatin in sheets or powders, like Knox.

In 1905, the Knox company hosted a recipe contest at the World’s Fair, and Mrs. John Cooke won third prize for her Perfection Salad, which consisted of lemon-flavored gelatin studded with chopped cabbage, celery, and red pepper. The recipe was published in magazines throughout the country and became hugely popular.

Fast forward to the aftermath of World War II, and many U.S. processed food companies began appealing to a new social phenomenon: women in the workforce. Women were still expected to feed their families, and instant gelatin, especially Jell-O, was marketed as a quick, effortless way to include a treat at meal time. With a few more steps, you could create this common 1950s dessert, the Crown Jewel. And if you added some chopped vegetables, a tin of shredded chicken, and a dollop of mayonnaise, you could have an elegant-looking side dish in no time.

The 1960s saw another food trend take savory gelatins to new heights of popularity: French cuisine (thank you, Julia Child), which featured savory gelatin dishes called aspics. The fact that you can now say that your jellied tuna salad was a creative twist on French haute cuisine lifted these savory wobblers’ prestige. It was during this time that Jell-O launched flavors like tomato, celery, and something called Italian salad. But many Americans still used the sweet flavors made popular by Perfection Salad and similar recipes to make their versions of aspics.

What doesn’t make sense, though, is that unflavored gelatin existed this entire time, and making a savory gelatin with it is as simple as swapping out broth or vegetable juice for the water you use in artificially flavored instant gelatin. Yes, homemakers had to economize every minute and every dish, or perhaps tastes were just different back then. Regardless, the shortcut gave jellied salads a certain reputation in this country, and dishes like Perfection Salad probably won’t show up at a Gen Z gathering despite Jell-O’s aesthetic rebranding.