The Joys of Jell-O Recipe #4: Cardinal Pear Mold

One of my favorite aspects of gelatin is its budget friendliness, and the Cardinal Pear Mold is the first recipe in JOJ that specifically appeals to its low-cost appeal. It's another simple recipe consisting of a spiced cherry gelatin served with canned pear halves to "glamorize" them, even though the pears are not incorporated into the gelatin in any way. That's a little like saying that serving some bread, meat, and vegetables is automatically a sandwich, but there it is.

At any rate, I took the pains to actually glamorize the pear halves a little bit, but honestly it was more out of necesity than sense of style. You see, I'm the only gelatin eater in my household, so I knew it would take me a while to eat all of this, and canned fruit has a tendency to spoil quickly once opened. So I submerged the pears in the gelatin as it cooled, which ended up looking rather nice and taking advantage of the other reason why gelatin is so budget friendly, which is that it preserves foods that are set in it.

The recipe called for individual molds to set the Cardinal Pear Mold in (okay, I get it, cardinals are red, but typically "cardinal" is not used as an adjective meaning "red"), but I couldn't justify spending money on individual Jell-O molds, so I used a serving suggestion I read about somewhere in one of these old cookbooks and just let it set in some pretty teacups.

I did use real-life brand-name Jell-O for this recipe (in the Black Cherry flavor), mostly to test a hypothesis. Something I noticed about the last few recipes I have made with Jell-O and thought were too sweet and intense was that they all had some additional sugar and/or fat in them (corn syrup, evaporated milk, etc). I thought maybe these flavor enhancers were why I found the vintage recipes so overly sweet--that is to say, that the Jell-O formulation of yesteryear was less sweet, with the notion that it was going to be dolled up with other flavors, as it often was in those days. As time went on, the average American wanted more convenience and simplicity in their desserts and started eating the jiggly stuff plain more often, so they wanted it sweeter, meaning that if you did spruce it up with juices or dairy, it would wind up a little overboard with flavor.

However, I found that even jazzed up with only minced ginger (I had some in the freezer and didn't want to buy a whole container of ground ginger for one recipe), canned pear syrup (okay, so this isn't the best test ever--I'll do a better version of this experiment someday) and orange zest, the gelatin was still too sweet. I still imagine that it was less sweet back in the day, which would make these sorts of recipe additions perfectly appropriate.

All told, the Cardinal Pear Mold still turned out well, and was very economical, as advertised. I still think the true ideal version of this dish would be made with natural cherry juice and unflavored gelatin, but honestly there's not anything else I would change. This is a refreshing, healthy dessert, and I can easily recommend it. The only other caveat I would mention is that the recipe says that it serves four, and maybe it does in individual molds, but in a pretty large teacup, it serves six, and if you skimped a little bit you could stretch it to seven.