Wait! Wut??!!? :eek:
Jello DESSERTS are FINE. I like Jello just fine. My objection is the encasement of non dessert foodstuffs in a dessert CASING.
Except meat pies. Meat pies are peachy. No, wait, that came out wrong. Meat pies are PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE, assuming you don’t try to load beef, chicken, or pork into a fruit flavored pie filling or some such damfoolishness.
Now, if someone out there wants to use a gelatin mortar to hold together some sort of spam edifice, well, fine and dandy. And if you wish to embed a fruit salad mix in your fruit flavored gelatin mold, that’s fine too.
But what mad universe calls for the implantation of olives and raw onion and little tomato pyramids in CHERRY JELLO, for potato’s sake?
Still remember trying to talk to my parents about it afterwards. It was the same sort of unsatisfying explanation they gave me for the unprovability of the existence of God, or why you couldn’t wear polka dots with plaids, or why turtles live longer than aardvarks. “Well, it just IS, son,” they said. “It wouldn’t be MY choice, but once upon a time, people did indeed put some pretty strange things into fruit flavored gelatin, and, well, Mrs. Garweed is old enough to remember when this was considered quite a TREAT, back in the Depression, when people had to eat baked rocks and wear live ferrets for clothing…”
Great story! Reminds of the family gatherings in my youth.
Plain flavored Jello for me, okay maybe strawberry or cherry Jello with bananas. My mom would make these things called Knox blocks (used Knox brand gelatin with a flavored Jello) that would stay “solid” without refrigeration to take to school in our sack lunch.
The nasty stuff I remember from these gatherings was the punch. A mixture of 7up, grapefruit juice, and maybe ginger ale with an ice ring floating around in the bowl. Even though all the kids thought it tasted terrible and you never saw adults drink it my aunt made it for every occasion and you got a glass whether you wanted some or not.
So, what ELSE did you put in it, if nobody would eat it? That actually sounds good.
BTW, back in the day, the Jello company briefly sold tomato and celery-flavored products, among a few others.
No sex. One star. (Ignore me spooning my Raymundo’s gelatin Créme Parfait, handcrafted in small batches.)
if you trulywish t o see jello in all its infamy go to www.midcentrymenu.com and click on the jello link shes even went to the official jello museum …
I hate bananas and can’t eat anything they are in.
My husband hates jello and won’t touch it. There are very very few foods he won’t eat but that’s one of them.
My daughter at that point in her life refused to eat any foods that were “mixed”.
I hadn’t really thought that through before I embarked on my geology experiment.
It occurs to me a whole thread could be composed… perhaps in the Pit… about “things my elders forced me to eat or drink that were utterly repulsive.”
Lileks.com and the Gallery of Regrettable Food has some fine examples of Jello Salad MidAmericana at their worst.
I grew up in the next town over from Leroy. I am actually sitting here, roughly 8 miles from the Jello Museum =)
Fixed link. (You left the U out of century.)
I do like the crrots in orange Jell-O. And I endured some of the lesser jelled horrors back in the 70s.
My mom makes a cranberry salad which mixes fresh cranberries with orange jello. She might have put it in a copper ring at some point, but mostly just a bowl. Served with sweetened whipped cream.
It’s a recipe that she developed over the years, so it was a bit of hit or miss whether it set up. It’s now been stable for 30 years.
However, I stopped eating jello. And I now use a recipe that keeps the skins of the cranberries and doesn’t need jello.
And due to this thread, I finally threw out an unopened box of powdered gelatine. The use by date was 2013.