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.