Howdy, Jigglers! Today we are going to talk about a Jell-O recipe that I put off for the longest time. Fruited Perfection is a molded salad featuring pineapple (no sweat), nuts (still perfectly normal), olives (I can deal with that), and cabbage (what are we doing now, General Foods?) all mixed together in a gelatin matrix of consomme (what is this?) flavored with vinegar and tropical Jell-O flavors. Of course. You might start to recognize why I postponed making this recipe for so long.
But the deal here at the Actual Joys of Jell-O is that I make all the recipes, so I couldn't skip it, and I just happened to have some broth I could use to make consomme, so why not? Or so I thought at the time.
First, I started with the consomme. I had read about how to make it before, but I had never actually tried it. I took some quail-and-chicken stock (long story) and brought it to a simmer with whipped egg whites in it, which did mostly work to clarify it, though it wasn't the most beautiful consomme ever devised. Then I skimmed off everything I could from the top and ran the consomme through a strainer, because what could it hurt?
To this I added two tablespoons of unflavored gelatin and heated it until almost boiling. After allowing the consomme to cool a bit, I added the vinegar and the lime juice that I used instead of lime Jell-O. This is where things first started to go awry: upon adding the acidic ingredients, the nice, clear consomme turned a sickly, milky white color. As instructed, I added some of the consomme-gelatin mixture to my mold on its own, arranging a few olive slices on top as it started to thicken. However, even at the time I figured you wouldn't be able to see the olives from the top, since the opacity slider on the gelatin had moved far past its initial setting.
Once the rest of the gelatin got to the "very thick" stage, I mixed in the rest of the ingredients, then added the newly chunky mixture to the other gelatin in the mold and refrigerated until completely hardened. Upon unmolding, I found myself with this:
The first practical problem with this mold is that it does not cut nicely. The cabbage strips make it turn into a gibbering pile of goo however delicately you try to slice it.
The second problem with this recipe is everything else. It doesn't look nice (I guess it looks kind of like molded coleslaw, which would be much better) and it tastes awful. I hate to be crass on this blog, but the taste of this dish is like if you went to a barbeque, ate some coleslaw, fruit salad, and chicken, then vomited all of that up, only if it were cold as it came up.
The writers of this recipe went very wrong when they were arguing over whether to make this a savory salad or a fruit salad and ultimately decided to make it both. The acidity of the vinegar and lime juice do not complement the consomme, neither of which are complemented by the cabbage and pineapple combination. The nuts and olives are fine on their own, but don't fit in with the other components one bit.
Before I tasted this, I thought that this recipe read like someone constructed a "Things that Work Well in Jell-O" dart board and threw five or six darts at it to determine what they would include. It tastes like it, too. I forced myself to eat about half of a "slice", then tossed the rest. My goal with all of these recipes is to make the best possible version of each one, and I believe I did that here, but much as an actor cannot transcend an asinine writer in a play, the best possible ingredients cannot transcend a garbage recipe.
I tried. Don't subject yourself to Fruited Perfection. I don't think the recipe writers did.
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