“Would you like some spoo? It’s quite fresh this week.”
These kinds of recipes make more sense if you remember; [DEL]Admiral Nelson* :eek:,[/DEL] Celery, Italian Salad, Mixed Vegetable, Seasoned Tomato, and Turnip discontinued Jell-O flavors (not that that makes any of this even vaguely more appetizing).
I doubt those flavors were particularly sweet, and it’s easy to imagine a misremembered celery Jell-O mold getting made with lime . . . 'cause all green Jell-O must be the same flavor, right? :smack:
CMC fnord!
*There before my edit of the page. I’d buy Admiral Nelson or any other meat flavors, assuming they weren’t awful, to add some easy extra body to my stocks. I already add unflavored gelatin for just that purpose, thanks to America’s Test Kitchen.
I still make tomato aspic for fancy occasions and it’s quite popular (in that it all gets eaten and people contact me after the fact looking for the recipe).
It has no sugar at all - it’s tomato juice and Knox gelatin power with a variety of spices and vegetables in it.
Now, sweet Jell-o with meat or veg sounds gross.
I read several blogs that make recipes from old books. Four of them had a jello challenge recently. Two of them ended up using flavored Jello. Two of them didn’t. Three of the recipes were agreed to be NASTY.
Links: Jello Challenge: Liver Pate en Masque on Mid-century Menu. Waikiki Whip on Retro WW Experiment. Swedish Jellied Veal on Dinner is Served 1972. Shrimp Salad Surprise on After Apple-Picking. Several of them have done other Jello recipes too, with weird ingredients. I get the impression that many of the recipes they try were cooked up by people more concerned with selling the ingredients than the edibility of the final product.
Well, that WAS the primary purpose for most of those recipe booklets to be printed in the first place. The booklets with gelatin mold recipes were printed by Knox, usually. The booklets with dairy recipes were printed by dairies. The booklets about meat dishes and barbecuing were printed by The Meat Council or the Beef Council or whatever. Some of them were really blatant about it, featuring the actual brand name product of the sponsoring company and repeatedly using the full brand name in the text, and others were fairly subtle beyond the obvious presence of the sponsoring company on the cover, front or back.
A strong clear meat stock, well-flavored with port or madeira, set up into an aspic with chilling, is fine eating.
When I refrigerate roasted or steamed chicken, its juices set up into a nice jelly that may or may not join up with the reheated meat, for I may eat it right in the kitchen because it tastes so good.
Well yeah, but you’d think they’d make sure it wasn’t utterly nasty when finished!
This is a vintage recipe that calls for sweet lime jello in a tuna dish!
This is not aspic, this is insanity!
Nasty is kind of an era- and location-dependent thing. There are a lot of recipes that nobody makes anymore that were huge in their day and would be received with near-universal “ick” today. And even that’s location-dependent. You could probably find a lot of church potlucks that have the pile of cabbage suspended in a Knox gelatin ring and the hole in the middle filled with mayonnaise even today.
Not just that, but a layer of aspic somewhat seals off the meat from the air, keeping it fresh a while longer. It would be poured over dishes coooling down from the oven, so the oven would sterilize the food and the gelatin would act like a kind of edible saran wrap.
If you buy paté by the slice, you often notice the remains of aspic on top. Yummy,
Indeed; I bought a church cookbook not five years ago (mostly in appreciation for the church ladies who fixed an after-funeral luncheon for a friend’s mother even though she hadn’t been a member there for fifteen years) and there was a SECTION, like, the kind with the folded down flap that you fold up to make dividers once you buy the book, labeled “Congealed Salads”.
The word gave me the heebie jeebies. One hesitates to gaze into that particular abyss.
I’m not sure that’s a safe assumption. Sweetened celery wasn’t always considered such a completely insane idea. Dr. Brown’s, the NY soda brand more famous for Cream and Black Cherry flavors, makes a celery soda - Cel-Ray. The flavor profile is hard to describe, kind of tonicy, vaguely healthful, and not entirely unlike ginger ale. Something you drink to settle your tummy after a big meal.
It’s difficult to find, even in NYC, but definitely still made.