Jell-O is the first thing I ever learned to cook. I don`t remember much about it except that my Jell-O was red and I was so small I could only watch it ”set” if it sat on the fridge`s bottom shelf.
Jell-O was omnipresent in my Midwestern childhood. My Aunt Rose made a spectacular Jell-O that somehow came out looking like a stained-glass window. My Aunt June, using real eggshells and magic, made Jell-O eggs at Easter. The sturdy green celery-and-pea Jell-O in my school cafeteria was so rubbery that anyone could, with practice, slap it like a hockey puck at someone halfway across the room.
Later, during a particularly vain phase, I drank unflavored gelatin, which I believed would give luster and length to my fingernails. Then I went off to college and became too sophisticated to deal with any form of gelatin- or so I thought. One night when I was in my early 20s, I was rushed to the hospital with mysterious stomach pains. Nothing proved wrong with me, but I`ll remember forever the nurse sailing in at 6:30 a.m., whipping open the drapes to reveal a bleak, frozen Iowa landscape, and announcing, ”Breakfast! It`s Jell-O!”
Nearly 20 years went by before one day in my Washington, D.C., supermarket my feet stopped dead in the Jell-O section. Call it middle-age nostalgia or urban burnout, but the package called to me like an old friend, an old friend I`d forgotten. I bought red (mix with cream cheese), orange (add mandarin oranges) and green (for pineapple and little marshmallows). It all came back to me, and in my mind I saw the church picnics of simpler times.
Life is more complicated now, of course. We`re so suspicious. How could anything that looks like plastic and wiggles like a silicone implant actually be digestible? Who came up with this stuff?
Imagine my surprise to learn that Jell-O was not invented by Lutherans in the Midwest. In fact, purified gelatin appeared in Europe centuries ago. Even Napoleon Bonaparte ate it, a fact that`s probably not important except that it dates jelled side dishes back to the early 19th Century. I have an 1856 American cookbook with recipes using isinglass, a pure whitish gelatin made from the air bladders of sturgeons. There`s also a recipe for a jelled, sweetened milk pudding called blanc mange, using carrageenan-the extract of a purplish cartilaginous seaweed named for the town of Carragheen on the coast of Ireland.
Modern-style gelatin powder was patented in this country in 1845. The flavored variety kicked around for half a century until some entrepreneurs put a pretty little girl`s picture on the box and proclaimed it ”America`s Most Famous Dessert.” By 1925, Jell-O had become a $647 million business. Today General Foods` Jell-O brand has such a lion`s share of the shimmery dessert market-82 percent-that the terms gelatin and Jell-O have become almost interchangeable.
And it isn`t even made out of cow and horse hooves like we all thought. This notion probably springs from novelist Eleanor Porter`s orphan character Pollyanna, who was forever taking neighbors gifts of calves` foot jelly.
These days most gelatin is made from fresh and frozen pork skins, as well as cattle bones and hides, all of which are laced with connective tissue. This tissue is full of collagen-a whitish, inelastic protein that gives rise to gelatin. Manufacturers run the collagen-rich tissue through a series of caustic chemical baths, combined with hot and cold soakings and washings, to free pure gelatin from the fats, minerals and other proteins.
When we, the consumers, add water and reheat the dry crystals, the water- loving little gelatin molecules uncoil and intertwine, trapping the liquid in a tough, elastic mesh. How`s that happen?
Imagine a swimming pool filled with tennis balls; those are the water molecules. Now drop in a whole bunch of Slinkys-you know, the coils of springy metal that kids play with. Those are the gelatin molecules.
Now turn up the heat (remember, this is imaginary): The Slinkys will start to soften and unwind. Stir everything around so that it gets really tangled and all the tennis balls are mixed up in the metal wires running every which way. That`s your basic warm gelatin. When this mix is then chilled, the Slinkys will shrink back toward their original shape, trapping the water molecules in the coils. This giant aspic will shimmy and shake in its mold but still hold up when overturned onto a plate. And that`s what`s so special about gelatin.
Never touch the stuff? Don`t kid yourself. Gelatin`s a huge part of our everyday lives. It makes Gummi Bears gummy and marshmallows marshy. In ice cream it emulsifies-breaks up and disperses-the water and fat globs, cutting back on the icky scum and gritty crystal factor. It also prolongs the life of air bubbles whipped into all kinds of frozen desserts. Gelatin`s the base for slippery throat lozenges and the whole substance of those hollow, easy-to-swallow little torpedoes that seal up our medicines and vitamins.
What`s more, gelatin makes a great diet tool. Plain gelatin actually requires more calories to digest than it delivers-an effect called specific dynamic action. When you eat a food that`s pure protein, like unsweetened gelatin, your body cranks up the intensity of its metabolic fires by about 30 percent. Calories are the fuel. A half-cup of sugar-free Jell-O (sweetened with aspartame) has only 8 calories-and by the time your body has finished its protein flare-up a few hours later, it has burned more than that.
The same action has been cited to bolster the idea that gelatin strengthens fingernails. For years Knox Gelatine has touted ”Knox for Nails,” although the company now soft-pedals such claims. In theory, a fired- up metabolism makes for warm, blood-rich fingertips, which then grow extra-strong nails. But studies have shown only that this is theoretically possible; scientists abandoned their quest for proof two decades ago.
Today gelatin stiffens and polishes straw hats and velvet jewelry box linings. It`s an additive in shampoos and cosmetics. Since 1871, it`s been used to bind light-sensitive chemicals to photographic plates and film. Unflavored gelatin now wrinkles crepe paper, ”microencapsulates” the ink on the back of carbonless carbon paper and even serves as a packing material for sensitive scientific instruments. Perhaps most important, it`s the pale wiggly stuff that keeps your canned ham from banging around inside the can.
The complicated chemical processing of gelatin takes it so far from its barnyard source that among regulatory agencies in Washington it isn`t even considered an animal product. And Jell-O brand gelatin, though made sometimes from pork, amazingly has been certified kosher and pareve (neither meat nor dairy) on the grounds that it`s so many steps removed from the pig that it is an entity wholly unto itself.
But Ben Shapera, president of Emes Kosher Products in Lombard, says he doesn`t hold with the idea that pork can be made kosher. So that everyone can enjoy gelatin in good conscience, Shapera offers up Kosher-Jel, a concoction of carrageenan and locust bean gum.
”So can I eat gelatin?” a vegetarian friend asked. ”No, it`s made from animal byproducts,” says Jennie Collura, president of the North American Vegetarian Society in Dolgeville, N.Y. But Collura and her family enjoy all kinds of jelled treats using agar-agar, an agent extracted from brown seaweeds and sold in health food stores.
”All you have to do to make a great gelatin,” Collura says, ”is add three tablespoons of agar flakes to a quart of fruit juice, boil it for five minutes, add fruit and refrigerate.” Collura sees only an aesthetic difference between agar-agar and gelatin. ”It`s not quite as slippery, and it doesn`t have that hospital-quality, shimmer-in-the-bowl look.”
Which brings us back to the hospital. Why are dietitians so fond of gelatin? Well, for one thing, it`s pure protein and carbohydrate-no fat-mixed with a large quantity of plain old water. But meanwhile the gelatin makes you feel, at least briefly, as if you`d eaten something substantial. As Georgetown University Hospital nutritionist Donna Runyan says, ”Jell-O is a transition between a clear liquid diet and eating again. It`s sort of a solid liquid.”
”It`s hard to believe,” Runyan says, ”but patients who haven`t eaten for a while get really excited about getting anything they can chew. It`s like, `Oh, boy! Jell-O!”`
Georgetown`s food-purchasing director, Peggy McGovern, says the hospital serves about 7 1/2 tons of Jell-O a year. Red is the most popular ”flavor,” then green, orange and lemon.
Runyan further points out that gelatin falls into the category of a
”comfort food,” like oatmeal. ”People haven`t had it for years. Then they see it on the hospital menu and remember they had it as a child. It gives them a feeling of solace.”
Maybe a national need for solace has led us back to gelatin. Last year, we bought a million boxes a day, about 65 million more than the year before. Now draw your own conclusions here: Red Jell-O with little marshmallows and a dollop of mayonnaise currently is a dessert option on Air Force One.
Once I rediscovered gelatin in my supermarket, I became a crusader. One night I was having a dinner party for some sophisticated eaters. I`ve learned of their foods: capers, anchovies, radicchio, cilantro. But have they learned of mine?
And so, on fine china I served them meat loaf, mashed potatoes and gravy, creamed peas and a great big bowl of plain red Jell-O. I told them it was important that the Jell-O melt into the potatoes, tingeing them with a ring of pink.
They all watched as it did just that.
Then they nodded in approval, looked very comforted, and ate every bite.
