https://www.midstory.org/the-mystery-of-the-midwest-jell-o-salad//
The Mystery of the Midwest Jell-O Salad
Jell-O salad, a staple of the Midwest potluck or holiday dinner table, has acquired an undesirable reputation outside of America's heartland. But with ancient origins and immense impact on American culinary culture, there's more to the Midwest salad beneath its jiggly surface. That is, if you can stomach it.
There are few foods as divisive as the Jell-O salad.
For some, it elicits a warm feeling of nostalgia for a childhood full of church potlucks and holiday gatherings. For others, the thought of tuna fish and cucumber suspended in lime-flavored gelatin has them reaching for a trash can instead of a fork.
Most people today would likely fall into the latter camp. That is, unless they live in the Midwest, where locals continue to make the salads, Lime Jell-O and tuna in hand, despite a downward trend in popularity. And by some measures, they might even be ahead of their time. Ring-Around-the-Tuna recipe from “Joys of Jell-O,” 1962. Image courtesy of General Foods Corporation via Vintage Recipes.
People started eating gelatin long before Jell-O became a cupboard staple.
“The first recipes go back to the Middle East, in the Middle Ages, around the year 1000 or so,” Ken Albala, culinary historian and author of “The Great Gelatin Revival: Savory Aspics, Jiggly Shots, and Outrageous Desserts,” said.
Initial gelatin recipes were typically only available to the wealthy, as the labor involved in making gelatin was intense: Collagen would be extracted from animal bones and skin and then undergo a lengthy clarification process, involving continuous straining and scraping that would be impractical for a home cook without a kitchen staff. This difficult process did not deter enterprising medieval chefs, whose gelatin recipes started to appear during the 12th and 13th centuries. By the time of the Renaissance, gelatin recipes were all the rage.
“They’re multicolored and layered. They’re flavored with all sorts of exotic spices and floral scents, and they’re really magnificent,” Albala said.
These recipes were also largely savory, or some mixture of savory and sweet, including ingredients like fish, vinegar and pork.
Despite their popularity, gelatin recipes faded into obscurity in the 1600s.
“Gelatin is one of those things that I would say, one of the few ingredients that goes so radically in and out of fashion over the years,” Albala said. “There are some periods that want things to be very simple and natural … and then there are some periods that want things that are technologically driven, with bright colors and bold flavors.”
It was technology that led to the re-emergence of gelatin in 20th-century America, when Peter Cooper was granted a patent for powdered gelatin in 1845. His powder was innovative — it was easier to produce and to cook than gelatins of the past — but it did not fly off of store shelves: It took widespread adoption of refrigeration and a massive marketing push starting in the early 1900s for name-brand Jell-O to take hold with consumers.
While home chefs experimented with their own recipes, the most widespread Jell-O salad recipes actually came from the company itself. Jell-O’s sponsored recipes helped Americans acclimate to savory foods mixed with sweet gelatin, including chicken suspended in lemon Jell-O and tomatoes suspended in orange Jell-O, served with lettuce and mayonnaise.
Other companies also had success in integrating their own product through Jell-O salad recipes, with 7-Up promoting 7-Up salad in 1953. The salad dipped into the dessert-like territory occupied by strawberry pretzel salad and watergate salad, both of which were also popularized by the Jell-O company. Together, these sweet recipes and others like them blurred the lines of what a salad could be, becoming a broader category of Jell-O-based food.
While gelatin saw wider adoption during this period, it maintained its status as a class-indicator food. Refrigerators were expensive and required up-to-date electrical systems, meaning only around 8% of Americans owned one by the early 1930s. Jell-O — which must be chilled to hold its shape — signaled to others that you could afford modern conveniences.
“You could show the people what you have without saying ‘I have a refrigerator at home’ by bringing a gelatin dessert in the middle of summer,” Catherine Lambrecht, a culinary historian who specializes in midwestern cuisine, said.
Jell-O’s status signaling was especially important for the Midwest, where rural areas lagged behind other regions in refrigeration. This made Jell-O-based dishes especially popular to bring to potlucks, maximizing the display of wealth.
Over time, though, refrigeration became commonplace; by 1960, 83% of Americans owned one. The novelty of Jell-O salads and the technology that enabled them had worn off, and with it, preferences started to shift.
“My generation was like ‘I don’t want to get that stuff, I want natural food,’” Albala said.
While Jell-O salads fell out of vogue with much of the U.S., they remained common in the Midwest, enough to earn the nickname “Midwest Salad,” a distinction it shares with a few other decidedly non-leafy dishes. Why they remain specifically in the Midwest is unclear, though there are some theories. A savory Jell-O salad from a 1930s cookbook recipe. Image courtesy of Science History Institute via Wikimedia Commons.
Bringing a Jell-O salad to a potluck may not hold as much social cache as it once did, but it remains a dish that’s easy to make and easy to share. Jell-O salads may also present fewer food safety concerns than hot savory dishes.
“I used to help manage a potluck picnic,” Lambrecht said. “We brought in lots of ice so cold food had the ability to stay cold. And the hot food, well, we just kept telling people ‘Either bring it really hot, or maybe just leave it at home for another day.’”
Albala has another theory: that Jell-O has a tendency to be popular with politically conservative people, which also makes up a majority of the Midwestern population.
“I think it actually charts pretty close to politics, because conservative-minded places like the Midwest and South still do Jell-O salads and still take it seriously,” he said. “Not that people’s taste follows their politics, but this one is pretty close.”
One other theory (one that was rejected by both Albala and Lambrecht) is that midwesterners’ taste for savory Jell-O might be inspired by the popularity of another gelatinous dish from Norway: Lutefisk.
“That makes absolutely no sense,” Albala said. “There are obviously pockets of Scandinavians in the Midwest, but that doesn’t account for Jell-O [salad] popularity at all.”
Regardless of how it came to be, the modern association between Jell-O salad and the Midwest appears to be fairly accurate — at least anecdotally.
“I can tell you that [Jell-O salad] disappears [from] my family table very fast, and nobody thinks of it as dessert,” Lambrecht said.
And Jell-O (with or without fish and nuts) may not be just for midwesterners much longer.
“My prediction is that it’s going to come back,” Albala said, citing the rise in lab-grown meat as potential evidence that Americans are ready to embrace futuristic foods yet again.
Between google trends data indicating a rise in popularity of searches for “Midwest Salad,” popular social media accounts extolling the virtues of Jell-O salads, and the adoption of savory Jell-O based dishes by some fancy restaurants, Jell-O salad really could be on a comeback.
But that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be for everyone.
“Ironically, I don’t like it at all,” Albala said. “Actually, it’s okay — but you have to add alcohol.”
