elizabethlevett

“They spell JELLO and JELLO spells a treat!”

That was the commercial on The Jack Benny Program from the mid-1930’s till about 1942. Jack even introduced himself, “Jello again, this is Jack Benny talking.” JELLO’s history goes back to 1897 in Le Roy, New York, when Pearle Bixby Wait and his wife Mary added sugar (and stuff) to gelatin – though the patent goes back to 1845. (This according to Wikipedia.) Actually, folks have been “enjoying” gelatin as a food product since way back in the 15th Century. Dang. According to the same article, “Gelatin, a protein produced from collagen extracted from boiled bones, connective tissues, and other animal products, has been a component of food, particularly desserts, since the 15th century.^[1]” Ew. I mean, yum! Gelatin was a big hit in Victorian times with “spectacular and complex jelly molds,” thank you very much. Something interesting to think about here – serving a gelatin dessert meant you had access to refrigeration! (Huh.)

But we’ll leave that ancient history and just dive in to my own mid-century experience. JELLO was a presence and then it wasn’t. Everybody knew about it. Everybody had it in the house. Everybody had a favorite – strawberry, raspberry, cherry, orange, lemon, or lime. You were either a JELLO purist – just a plain dish of the stuff maybe diced into cubes and tumbled into your little dessert dish – hopefully one of those dainty Lily glass ones – just the perfect size, or else maybe your mom prepared what Don Wilson (Jack’s announcer) would describe as a “shimmering mold” (two words I can’t hear in combination without a nervous smile) with sliced fruit stirred up and suspended like so many millipedes in amber. Wow.

My own sainted mom was a true JELLO believer. If you were sick at our house, you got JELLO. She believed it was restorative – you know, sugar, protein, and colorful, wiggly-jiggly fun! It was “easy to digest.” In fact, she was a gelatin believer. She used to keep Knox gelatin around and stir up a cup for her ”nails and skin.” I gotta say, I’m pretty sure the Irish are down with anything involving bones. Mom loved to serve JELLO at Sunday night supper. The Sunday tradition when I was growing up started with fasting before Mass, a nice big breakfast and then a fabulous dinner in the middle of the day. (Oh, her pot roast, her standing rib roast or leg of lamb with the vegetables just perfect in their glaze of savory brown stuff. I raise a glass. I shed a tear.) By Sunday evening my mother was “in no mood” to cook. Supper consisted of a picnic – just a few things laid out to munch while watching Disney. There would be stalks of celery (you have no idea how much celery I ate as a child!). There would be crackers and cheese. And there would be JELLO. Her favorite recipe consisted of lime JELLO with little tiny chunks of Philly cream cheese and slices of canned pears. (Yes, the days of fruit in a can.) It was perfect when I was small.

A lot of people added stuff to JELLO. Honestly, for all of the emphasis on flavor I always found it kinda unremarkable on its own. It wasn’t the taste that fascinated me, it was the texture – the incredible tensile strength! Like, you know, water is liquid, you freeze it and suddenly it’s solid – hard solid though. So how come JELLO could be so solid and yet so, you know, mobile, so elastic, so, er, fluid!? According to L.G. Fonkwe, “The rigidity modulus depends on the gelatin concentration, the weight-average molecular weight, and temperature…” Science.

Always on board for scientific exploration I decided to experience for myself the surface tension of JELLO. One Sunday evening a little before Disney, I crept into the kitchen by myself and held open the refrigerator. Everyone else was in the living room (or so I thought). I reached ever so carefully, slowly and placed my outstretched hand – fingers spread out directly on top of the chilled sea of lime glass in the salad bowl waiting just next to the dish of celery. As I gingerly lifted my hand, my betrayal was instantly revealed as the image of my five fingers and my five-year-old palm stared back. Behind me suddenly was the biggest person in my world – Dad. “Do you think anyone’ll notice?” he asked gently. There you have it. JELLO will out.

Then we grew up as people tend to do and JELLO was left behind. We were in college. We were too cool even for JELLO. But Karma is an interesting phenomenon. As I left the world of shimmering, wiggling JELLO behind with my high school yearbook and my blue bike, I found myself working a bunch of jobs to survive in college. Naturally I ended up in the cafeteria raising hell and making ends meet. When I finally graduated from the steamy dish room (a raucous story for another time!) I made it to the prep kitchen. The morning shift (when college students are customarily hungover) meant cracking dozens of eggs. (Oops – dropped a shell in – don’t say anything, act casual). The afternoon prep (when college students are often stoned outa their minds) involved taking huge, huge slabs of JELLO that had cooled on gigantic pans (probably aluminum) and cutting into them in a crisscross pattern to form 1-inch cubes that would be piled into clear plastic bowls to be set into the salad bar. There it was. JELLO followed me to college like a specter from the past, reminding me of home and Disney and canned pears floating like so many millipedes in amber. Wow.