The Jell-O Movement

My cousin recently sent me a package from her late mother’s estate that included some of my family’s photos and our mothers’ family photos.  It also included mementos from my parents’ wedding, many of which I had never seen. 

I was delighted to find the entire page cut from the local newspaper announcing my parent’s nuptials.  It gave a colourful report of the event alongside a photograph that I would come to know as their ‘official’ wedding portrait.  The photo showed them coming out of the church as a newly married couple.  They were gorgeous and were caught laughing in their joy and delight!  A picture of a Mr and Mrs Emmitt, who had been married on the same day at a different church (but amazingly used the same photographer) was also featured on that society page, but they looked dour and irritated compared to my folks.  By the way, both couples had been married on Saturday, and this was THURSDAY’S edition of the paper!  (Truly astounding turnaround!)     

I spent a great deal of time reading the reports of both weddings, before moving on to the exhausting details of a Miss Margorie Donohue’s trousseau tea, which was held at home of her mother and made it into the newspaper the next day.  I read about how a Mr and Mrs H. O’Mahony and their daughters, Elizabeth and Jane, had been visiting the community from London, England, and that Miss Marie Westland had just returned from a motor trip to Toronto. 

After savouring all of this captivating info, I started to look at the ads featured in that 1954 newspaper, and what caught my eye was a half page ad on the back shouting that Jell-O now had an INSTANT pudding that required no cooking or chilling, and that this was the Biggest Dessert News In Years! 

A half page ad.  Instant pudding. 

There were cartoon drawings showing a mom whipping up something in a bowl with a rotary hand beater and then plopping a small bowl in front of a baby in a highchair, much to it’s delight.  Do we still think it’s smart to feed babies instant pudding??    

So of course that got me thinking about the world of Jell-O. 

Once aspic had been discovered, as far back as before the 9th century, it had been used to make liquids somewhat solid.  But wobbly.  Aspic is a savoury use of gelatin and was very time-consuming to make (don’t worry about from what), therefore it was only within the domain of nobles and royals.  A brag dish of sorts.  It also preserved the food it encased, which was very helpful at the time.

As sugar became more affordable through global trade expansion during the 18th century, the use of gelatine grew to include desserts as well as savouries, and by the late 1890s, was being refined into a powdered form that busy home cooks were able to purchase for themselves.  

The Jell-O brand, featuring powdered gelatine with added fruit flavouring, was an idea that had been sold in 1899 by its originator, to a larger food company who had the deep manufacturing pockets and marketing budget needed to introduce and sell the product.  Even then, it took several years to actually catch on. 

Eventually, the success of the Jell-O brand was cleverly accomplished, starting in 1902, through ads in prominent magazines and, in 1904, when the company sent out seasoned salesmen armed with free Jell-O based cookbooks to hand out to homemakers who hadn’t realized that they needed their gelatin to be fruit flavoured.  Once consumers caught on to the potential of the flavoured treat, they started shoving everything they could find into their Jell-Os and insisting that it showed style and refinement. And everyone went mad for all things jellied. 

By the 19-teens, Jell-O was launched in Canada, and 3 additional flavours were added to the lineup.  Chocolate (discontinued by 1927) (chocolate jello?), peach, and cherry, joined the original flavours of strawberry, raspberry, orange, and lemon.  A concoction known as Jell-O Salad which added in chopped cabbage, red peppers, and celery, had already established street cred when it won the blue ribbon at a county fair in Pennsylvania in 1904, but subsequent versions of jellied salads and desserts would eventually start popping up and could include cream cheese, stuffed olives, canned tomato soup, cooked pasta, nuts, fruit of all kinds (canned as well as fresh), marshmallows, pretzels (!!), cheese, crushed candies, Champagne, canned tuna, and of course, whipped cream or Cool Whip. 

Adding whipped cream to a Jell-O was how we knew it was a party!

The ‘new’ Instant Pudding of my 1954 newspaper clipping, had been slipped onto the Jell-O roster, in its chocolate form, in 1936 but other flavours were slowly added as well.  Vanilla, butterscotch, and coconut moved in, as did pistachio, although the dates that they were added to the production line are very difficult to track down.  The pistachio flavoured pudding became a wonder in and of itself, and many of you will remember there being a box of it in the cupboard just waiting for that one recipe that it would only ever be used in!  (They still make and sell pistachio pudding, by the way, so you might want to dig out a family recipe book and grab a box on your next grocery trip!)

Poke Cakes (which had you poke a series of holes into a freshly baked cake before pouring liquid Jell-O over top prior to chilling and icing) showed up as early as the 70s but didn’t take off for a while in my neighbourhood.  I wonder if they had to take out a half page ad for that idea too!

Whenever you are allowed a glimpse back into a bygone era, as I was with the wonderful clipping sent by my cousin, it is not only a rare opportunity to peek at a world that can never be possible again, due to our world’s constant ‘advancements’, it’s also darn interesting to be able to see the long-game results of what a slick marketing team and a generous budget are able to accomplish!