Joys of Jell-O Recipe #2: Pastel Pie (aka Pepto Pie)

Okay, so if you are following along with this project at home (though I hope you aren't), you will notice that the Pastel Dessert is not the first recipe in Joys of Jell-O. The Hawaiian Dessert is. Well, I'm not making that first because I don't currently have a blender or anything that could suffice for ice-crushing purposes, so I'm going to skip that one until I do.

In the meantime, here's the second recipe from the book, Pastel Dessert. It is a very simple dessert wherein you mix a package of flavored gelatin, a package of vanilla pudding mix, and whipped cream. A fun variation attached is to spread the resulting mixture into a baked pie shell, which is exactly what I did. For all of the recipes in these books that have optional variations, I'm going to make the version that seems most appealing and call it a day--otherwise I'd need to make the same recipe various times, and that's just not going to happen. But I enjoyed the idea of a creamy pink pie, so I grabbed an envelope of cherry Jell-O and a frozen par-baked pie crust and dove right in.

As the recipe would suggest, this is an easy dessert to make, which is something I like about gelatin: you can make tasty, light, and often impressive dishes with relatively little time or effort. In the early twentieth century, Jell-O branded itself as the perfect food for newlywed women to cook, with the assumption that said women probably were not yet cooking experts but still had a husband to feed. Even today I think it makes a lot of sense as something for newlyweds, kids, or anyone who's short on time or cash to make.

Anyway, this recipe comes together exactly as the recipe states. The only thing that worried me during the process was when I was mixing the whipped cream and the gelatin mixture, I didn't think they were going to blend entirely. For a while they just sort of marbled, which honestly would make for an attractive dessert as well, but eventually I got a completely uniform...Pepto-Bismol pink.

Now, I knew the pie would be pink--in fact, that's why I chose the cherry flavor, but the red food coloring is potent enough to do this even when diluted with a whole quart's worth of whipped cream. And let me tell you, the flavoring is just as strong. This pie is very sweet and very fake fruity. My tolerance for that sort of thing is high, but the whole time I wished I had made a double batch of filling, using one packet of Jell-O and one packet of unflavored gelatin. However, that would have been enough to feed a platoon, because not only did one batch fill a nine-inch pie shell, but also all these baking cups (plus one that I had already eaten by the time I took this photo)!

After a couple of servings, I got used to the strong flavor and finished off the pie and cups no problem. I guess it didn't hurt that I had some extra whipped cream to pile on top to further dilute the flavor. However, in the future, I would use fresh fruit juice in place of some of the water and one envelope of Knox in place of the Jell-O flavoring (this texture would be especially nice with fresh-squeezed orange juice), though using the boxed pudding mix is a lot faster and cheaper than making homemade vanilla pudding, so for an easy dessert I would probably leave that part as written. Another quick note: if you choose to put some of this filling into a pie crust, the crust will stay crisp for only a day or so after the gelatin sets, so if you don't like mushy pie crust and don't have a crowd to feed right after making this, I recommend setting the gelatin in individual-sized serving dishes and foregoing the crust altogether.

All in all, this recipe is a good idea that would be a fun little dessert with better flavoring. I can particularly imagine a few people coming together and making several batches of this with different juices to make different pastel colors (lime, lemon, blueberry, any red fruit juice, grape) for an Easter celebration at church. If you increased the amount of gelatin you could probably even use a deviled egg platter or plastic Easter eggs to make egg-shaped molds. So I officially declare the Pastel Dessert redeemable.

Introduction to The Actual Joys of Jell-O: Goals

Gelatin is a fascinating food, and much of the Internet's fascination with it springs from the mid-twentieth century, when Jell-O desserts were king and General Foods (Jell-O's parent company at the time) was trying to push it as a perfect food for any occasion. Many of the results of this era are now looked upon with revulsion and amusement, eschewed for Jell-O shots and simpler, more reasonable dessert recipes.

However, during Jell-O's heyday, there were a number of cookbooks published by General Foods that perfectly highlight the "1. Start with any given foodstuff. 2. Add Jell-O. 3. Profit!" mentality, and that is the topic of this little blog right here. Joys of Jell-O (1962) and The New Joys of Jell-O (1973) are the main ones from that period, and I just happen to have a copy of each. After having read through them, I decided they needed to be preserved digitally for posterity, hence the website.

So, the idea here is to cook all of the 190 recipes from Joys of Jell-O and, if I still feel ambitious about the project after all of that, the 106 recipes from The New Joys of Jell-O. That book is slightly less important, though, because someone has already completed the task of posting and making all of those recipes. Regardless, I would like to get those done to preserve the recipes in a format where the reader doesn't have to scroll past a lot of whining about politics to get to the recipes and the poster's thoughts on them. In addition, at some point I may have other vintage Jell-O cookbooks in my collection, so those might also be on the table at some point, because it's important for future generations to know what life was like back in the day.

Artificial coloring-laced splattering suggests that this cookbook was well used in its day.

Parameters

To make this goal a reality, I am going to make and post the recipes from each book in order (with a couple of exceptions for logistical reasons). (NOTE: I have since abandoned this strategy because having all of the savory dishes come at me at once was not something I wanted to contend with, so they fairly quickly start to go in a random order.) I want to explore the limits of gelatin's feasible applications, but with a couple of stipulations.

Though I love relentlessly mocking things like the desperate corporatism seen in these cookbooks, I really would like all of these recipes to succeed, so my goal is to make each recipe in its ideal form. You see, before making this blog, I had already make two recipes from these books: the marshmallow recipe from TNJOJ and the Pastel Pie from JOJ. What I found from making those recipes exactly as written is that Jell-O seems way too strongly flavored, not to mention artificial-tasting. It's possible that this was not the case when the recipes were devised in the '60s and '70s, but it certainly is today, so I will make changes as needed to test the value of the recipe rather than the gelatin formulation. 

A good case in point is any savory Jell-O recipe that calls for lemon-flavored gelatin with added vinegar to make it savory-ish. From everything I've read, that doesn't work well at all, so instead of going down that dark road, I will incorporate a flavoring agent that will actually complement the other flavors in the recipe. In many cases this may also mean using unflavored gelatin (e.g. Knox or Vital Proteins) with juice in fruity dessert recipes. Furthermore, after making each recipe, I will make notes of what I would change were I to make it again.

So that's what I'm going for. Of course, any comments and suggestions are welcome, though cooking blogs are a dime a billion, so the odds of anyone reading this is pretty nonexistent. I don't have any particular timeline set for this, though gelatin recipes typically don't take long and I typically cook once a week, so maybe once a week? We'll see.