Ah. Jell-O. The pre-packaged wobbly dessert that stole our hearts. And of course the foundation of Jell-O salads. But it wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time Jell-O—or more specifically gelatin the building block of Jell-O and the Jell-O salad—was a staple of Napoleon-Bonapart-and-King-George-IV-type fancy meals. Of course this kind of spread wouldn’t be possible if gelatin didn’t manage to wow the taste buds of famous chefs like Marie-Antoine Carême a contemporary of King George and Napoleon Bonapart.
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 Historidame | 2023-08-08 11:47:44 |  4,919 Views |
The History of Gelatin Salad: Delicious Delicacy or Culinary Crime?
If Jell-O food of kings is hard to believe consider this. One of Carême's signature gelatin mixtures involved creating elaborately sculpted centerpieces out of the wobbly stuff. To put that in perspective Atlas Obscura calls such a gesture the modern equivalent of a "master chef placing towering Jell-O mixtures at a royal wedding or the French Laundry." (That's the three-Michelin-starred restaurant in California not a French Laundry to be clear.)
It took some time for a historical through-line to emerge between the King's Table and the Jell-O salads that dominated the fine dining scene of the early 20th century but there is a through-line. By the time Mrs. John E. Cook introduced her Perfection Salad to the world via a Better Homes and Gardens and Knox Gelatin contest the foundation for Jell-O salad as a luxury item had been laid centuries before its invention.
This is a mystery to those looking at Jell-O salad with 21st-century eyes. But gelatin-as-a-luxury-food goes back further than most people realize even further than Marie-Antoine Carême; it goes all the way back to Europe in the 1400s. Back then making gelatin was a tedious business at best. Only those of considerable wealth could afford the kitchen staff needed to turn animal bones cow hooves and other unmentionable parts into collagen the building blocks of gelatin.
