I was reminded today of a dark time in American cuisine.
For some reason, during the post WWII era, there seemed to be an intense desire on the part of some Americans to do weird things with commercial gelatin.
Many of these experiments are still with us, and have been successfully integrated into Generic White People Cuisine. Ambrosia, a jello based treat that incorporated Cool Whip, marshmallows, and fruit and nut bits, was a staple at Thanksgiving, and there are any number of fruit salad recipes in which the fruit is embedded in sweet jiggling fruit flavored deliciousness. And that’s okay. They’ve stood the test of time. They have outlasted their haters, and have taken their place in the hierarchy of the Food Pyramid, so to speak.
But a long time ago, I was young, and some of the outliers weren’t quite so far out there as we might wish.
Y’see, I was raised Methodist. And with the Methodists, while the “covered dish supper” is not a sacrament, per se, you’d THINK it was, what with the frequency with which these gatherings are held.
The rules are simple: each family brings a covered casserole dish containing some sort of food product, and the dish is placed on a buffet, and after a short socialization and chatter, grace is spoken, and everyone gets up and files along the buffet table loading up a plate with whatever there is to eat. Then you sit down in groups and eat and chat and hang out. There are other parts to the ritual, but that’s the gist of it.
And I remember learning, over time, that Covered Dish Suppers were a sort of White Protestant version of *“trial by ordeal.” *
It would have been sometime in the early seventies, and I would have been seven years old or so, and I was cheerfully loading up my plate, but I was aware there were RULES to be followed. Politeness. Just because Old Lady Melonballer’s fried chicken was particularly delicious did not mean one took more than one piece. Leave some for someone else. In addition, desserts were fine, but not too much of any one in particular, even if Dan Dan the Insurance Man thought it was funny to cut a slice of cake and then take the whole cake and leave the slice, a joke he performed at Every. Single. Church. Supper. Ever.
And above all, one did NOT point at a given concoction and say out loud, “What the &#%@ is THIS &@#%?”
No. Politeness was hammered in from an early age, and I do think that if Jack the Ripper showed up and started sawing off the minister’s head, I would have betrayed no more than an expression of mild surprise. If a given foodstuff was unidentifiable, one looked to see if anyone else was eating it. One did NOT ask what it was. And unless one wished to risk a weird surprise, perhaps one would be best served by avoiding it.
But I remember that one particular Sunday night when I saw the shining green Jello thing. It was very pretty. It glowed a translucent green, and was not transparent, but translucent, hinting of yumminess within. No one else had touched it, so I hefted the serving spoon and cut myself a reasonable but generous portion, added it to my plate, and went and sat down. First, of course, I ate Mrs. Melonballer’s chicken. Priorities, of course. After that, Mrs. Stonebreaker’s brownie. I had a routine, after all.
But eventually, I worked my way down to what I thought was some sort of lime Jell-O fruit salad.
And I took a bite.
And I sat there, for what seemed like a very long time, trying to figure out what I was eating.
I was indeed right about the lime Jell-O. But the chunky bits were the wrong consistency and flavor, and the cloudy stuff was NOT Cool Whip; it was something heavier, with a different texture and flavor… sour? Was this SOUR CREAM? And what was this ROUND thing… was this MEAT? Hot dog coins? No… too soft… mighod, it was SLICED VIENNA SAUSAGE!!!
“Are you all right?” my mother asked archly. Dad was still laughing like hell at Dan Dan the Insurance Man and the amazing cake joke that never gets old.
“I didn’t say anything,” I said defensively.
“No, you did not,” she said approvingly. “But your eyes are different sizes and if the wheels were spinning any harder, you’d have smoke coming out your ears. Go throw it away and get another plate, if you want.”
And with the imprimatur of authority, I did so. But this was how I learned of the perfidy of Jello Salad.
Over time, I would learn that Jello was, to some folk, more than a mere dessert; it was to some a base raw material that one could use to construct a sort of food EDIFICE, an agglomeration of various foodmatters fused into one… um… THING, using a mortar of sugared gelatin. At least half the congregation of the church was over sixty, and some of these folks had learned in decades past that some VERY questionable things were acceptable to serve to an unsuspecting public. Things with tomatoes, olives, Spam… and worse.
I was also learning, around that time, that veterans of the Great Depression had some odd ideas about food. Namely, that once it was on your plate, you ATE it. No buts. No exceptions. Food wastage was apparently the cosmic key that made it possible for Satan himself to come collect your body AND soul, right there on the spot, just because you left three peas and an overlarge smear of gravy. And, of course, as a CHILD, all rules applied triply to ME.
Over time, I learned to be wary as hell of anything made of Jello.
Fortunately, Jello is a forgiving food. It’s TRANSPARENT, meaning if there’s anything IN there, you can examine it and make an informed decision. Olive slices, for example, were right out. Diced pears were iffy; LOTS of cubed vegetables look like diced pears. But cherry halves and grapes were generally a good sign of edibility.
Which brings us to the horrible Christmas dinner of '72, the night Mrs. Garweed ambushed me.
I was working my way down the buffet, and had selected my fried chicken leg and my brownie and was casting around for anything appealing, when suddenly, a wet red slab of something resembling a translucent internal organ came flying out of the skies and slapped wetly onto my plate, atop my poor brownie and chicken leg.
“TRY THIS,” sang Mrs. Garweed with a note of desperation in her voice. Mrs. Garweed would have been pushing eighty around that time, and her covered dish offerings were not popular. Looking back, I suppose one might have got the idea that she and her husband had stumbled through a spontaneous portal from a parallel universe, one where canned meat and raw vegetables were considered “dessert,” canned fruit in syrup was an entree, and actual fresh meat products and raw fruit either didn’t exist or were not trusted by the natives. I would later develop a theory that Mrs. Garweed had survived the depression by eating rodents, tumbleweeds, and perhaps her own children, possibly suspended in aspic, but I was young and not quite that imaginative yet.
I looked up at her. She smiled brokenly at me, tongs and spatula in hand. “TRY it!” she said brightly.
I noticed she was the only person actually trying to serve any food; everyone else was just letting everyone else choose what they ate. Apparently Mrs. Garweed had grown tired of taking the same food home that she brought with her, and had decided to be more proactive in its serving. I was apparently her first victim; she’d sawed off a rubbery wet slab of something embedded in cherry Jello that was easily half the size of my plate. SOMEONE, by ghod, was going to eat her offering!
I glanced around, trying not to look panicked. Mom wasn’t even in the room, she was out with the decorations committee, and Dad was over at the drinks table, laughing because Dan Dan had poured himself a small glass of Pepsi and was walking away with the quart bottle, leaving the glass on the table.
I looked up at Mrs. Garweed again. She tried to grin. She showed teeth, anyway. The effect was ghastly.
“Ah,” I said. “Well. Thank you.” I looked at my plate. There wasn’t any room on it for anything else, and it was going to take an excavation project to see if the chicken leg and brownie could be exhumed.
And so I turned and headed for the children’s table, thinking to carefully dissect the damp red thing, retrieve the actual food, perhaps autopsy the jello thing to see what it contained, and then casually dump it in the trash can and get another plate.
And I sat down, picked up a fork, and prodded at the wet red thing.
It had not had time to set completely, and was sweating red juice. It reeked of a cherry smelling apocalypse. Through its translucence, I could see little cubes and triangles of something diced up fairly small. No spheres. Just cubes, squares, and little pyramids. What the hell was IN this stuff? And far, far, below, like a shipwreck barely visible from the surface, I could see my chicken leg and brownie, sunk beneath fathoms of sweaty red horror, looking forlornly up at me as if to say what did we do to deserve this?
I glanced up at the buffet. Sure enough, Mrs. Garweed was staring at me intently. I wasn’t going to get out of this gracefully. So with a mental shrug, I sawed off a medium sized bite and put it in my mouth.
Cherry. Gah. Cherry. What had she DONE? I’d HAD cherry jello before, but this was CHERRY cherry, this was cough syrup intensity, and how did you MIX cherry jello this strong? Still, it was livable. I began to dissect the gelid mass with my tongue, seeking data on what the chunks were. A suspicion became a certainty when I moved one of the little squares between my teeth and bit down: raw onion.
I glanced at Mrs. Garweed. She was still staring intently at me, aware that I had taken a bite. A ghost of a smile was flickering at the corners of her mouth. She apparently fully intended to stare me down until I choked down that entire plateful.
I decided I wasn’t as curious about the chunks as I’d thought, and simply swallowed the whole mouthful. It slid down obligingly enough, albeit reminding me of every bad cough and sore throat I’d ever had.
I took another bite. Cherry CHERRY cherry CHEEERRRRRY raw onion and was that spam? Ohghod, it was spam. Straight from the can, and greasy as anything. I swallowed, quickly.
And Mrs. Garweed beamed like I’d chosen her to lead the Christmas Pageant, carrying a slab of raw meat jello on high. And then she suddenly pounced on someone else in the line, and slapped a hunk of bleeding red glory onto their plate.
And I realized that I had a chance.
I began pretending to chat with those around me, although the chatter with my fellow children was largely, “Good lord, what is THAT stuff and are you actually EATING it?” while dissecting and moving red wobbly sweaty chunks around the plate. Soon I’d exposed part of the chicken leg.
And when Mrs. Garweed attacked another patron, I took advantage of her distraction to whip a half pound of the stuff under the tablecloth. And she glanced at me, and I smiled and nodded and waved my fork at her. And she beamed happily and shoveled twenty pounds of the stuff onto Dan Dan the Insurance Man’s plate, and I got easily half of what was on MY plate under the table.
After that, I was able to eat my chicken leg and brownie, although they’d suffered somewhat; they had no crisp or crunch remaining, and tasted like they’d been marinated in Smith Brothers Cough Syrup.
I also discovered that the pyramids were carved from tomato.
And shortly thereafter, I excused myself and went to the bathroom on tippy toes, and once there, emptied an amazing amount of red mush into the toilet from out of both shoes. I hadn’t been as on target as I would have liked, and was quite sure there was a place on the floor before my seat that surely looked like someone had sacrificed a goat there.
I ate nothing else that night, as everything tasted like the juice in a jar of maraschinos, and I honestly wasn’t sure I could keep anything else down; Mom agreed that perhaps I wasn’t well, and took me home.
And from then thereafter, when at covered dish suppers, I made a point of being wary not only of Jello, but of Mrs. Garweed; she died a few years later, and I am certain, from my glances around the church, that I wasn’t the only person who felt a tad of guilty relief at that particular funeral.
MILLENIALS! While I recognize many of the problems presented ye pioneers of the 21st century? Be glad that by the time you came around, the Jello Corporation had done with trying to sell all the housewives on the gelatin based diet.
