Notes on Jell-O

A guest post by my friend Aimee Levitt

“I have been digging away at my bowl of green Jell-O for a few hours now. It doesn’t really taste like limes. It tastes like sugar with a bit of an edge.” -Aimee Levitt

I have a friend named Aimee Levitt who’s as whip-smart, kind and funny as they come—and a sensational writer. Aimee and I get together, not nearly as often as we should, to talk shop and to share the mostly prosaic observations we come across, which we enjoy shaping into amusing little anecdotes (thoughts of a city-dwelling owl, etc.). A lot of life is mundane; it’s important to find amusement therein. 

Aimee writes for all sorts of places, including the Chicago Reader, The Guardian and Eater. You can follow her here and here. She also has a Substack about things she does with her dog Joe. Reading it will warm your soul like the smell of chocolate chip cookies baking, but it will also leave you with something to ponder. It’s a joy.

Some of my favorite writing Aimee does involves plumbing the depths of forgotten cookbooks and the colorful characters who’ve populated the food culture realm (this piece on the 1988 cookbook Martha Stewart Christmas is marvelous). Recently, Aimee’s cousin gave her an illustrated recipe pamphlet called “Joys of Jell-O,” which sent Aimee on a deep dive through the wonderful(?) world of colored gelatin that she wrote about for Eater. Over coffee a few months ago, I wondered aloud if there might be some tidbits that didn’t make the final cut (mold). Of course there was more! she told me, after which I begged for a contributed piece I could share here. 

Since that day, I’ve been suspended in anticipation, like a piece of canned pineapple inside a whisked mixture of sugar, powdered gelatin, water and Red Dye #2. Then last week, “Notes on Jell-O” arrived in my inbox, and I promptly, delightedly liquified (because I exist at human temperature—read on!). Anyway, please enjoy this letter from Aimee, which contains everything she had left to say about Jell-O after spending far too much time with it for the sake of food journalism.

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Dear Maggie,

I realize it has been several months since I promised you this guest post on Jell-O. Today, however, I am finally getting around to writing it, mostly because, owing to an upcoming medical procedure*, I am not allowed to eat anything besides Jell-O. Jell-O qualifies as “non-solid” because even though it appears solid enough to mold into interesting shapes, it apparently liquifies at human temperature. This is just one of the many things that makes it so magical. Unfortunately, red Jell-O, the best Jell-O, is on the “do not eat” list because the dye can be mistaken for blood, and therefore severe internal bleeding on scans. Which makes me wonder if there are any people out there who have been diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses because they accidentally ate red (or purple) Jell-O the day before a medical procedure.

*Note: Said procedure was routine!

Incidentally, Jell-O has the same density as human flesh, so it’s been used to test the effects of bullets. There is an instrument that measures whether Jell-O has the proper degree of bounciness. It is called a gelometer. When you hook a bowl of Jell-O up to an EEG machine, it has the same level of activity as a human brain.

I was prepared for today because I had boxes of green Jell-O (“lime”) and yellow Jell-O (“lemon”) left over from my earlier experiments. Lemon was among the original four Jell-O flavors. Lime was introduced in 1930 when the manufacturers of Jell-O noticed that lemon had become a best-seller. This was because people were using it as a medium for creative savory salads. Jell-O apparently had the power to stretch the sad contents of an almost-empty fridge (or icebox) into some semblance of a meal. The Great Depression was happening, so I guess it helped people to believe this. I know of only one person who was alive during this era, the 90-year-old man who is dating my mother, and he says he has fond memories of Jell-O meals during his childhood. This is also why they serve Jell-O in nursing homes and hospitals, because it inspires feelings of happiness. I wonder what will happen when our generation takes over the realms of the old people. Will we revolt? Will we demand the non-foods of our own childhoods? Gummy fruit snacks would be a lot harder to eat with no teeth. 

Anyway, Jell-O decided that if lemon was popular in salads, lime would probably work as well.

Lime Jell-O, incidentally, was the favorite flavor of Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl. She was obsessed with staying thin in order to hang on to the man who saved her from being a sex-having single girl. Her Jell-O preparation used half the recommended amount of water so it had the texture of rubber. (Unofficially. I don’t think she ever tried measuring it with a gelometer.) Such is the pain of women.

Once upon a time, they had chocolate Jell-O. I think it may be possible to recreate it now with chocolate syrup and gelatin, but I confess I don’t have the heart to try. Although… maybe it would be like a very bad chocolate mousse? There were also savory Jell-O flavors: celery, tomato, mixed vegetable, and Italian seasoning. I’m actually surprised celery didn’t catch on as a canvas for salads because it doesn’t really taste like anything. But maybe it didn’t because savory Jell-O didn’t come around until the 1950s, and by then the American palate had been trained to expect sweetness.

There is no other country besides the U.S. where people habitually ate Jell-O. An American astronaut introduced it to her Russian colleagues on the space shuttle Mir in 1996. The Russians were enchanted and demanded it every Sunday. In space, I guess it’s hard to tell when Sunday actually is, so they were asking for it all the time. During the Cold War, Jell-O ads often mentioned how sad it was that Soviet housewives had no access to Jell-O. Maybe they weren’t bullshitting after all and there really was a secret yearning throughout the old USSR for Ring Around the Tuna.

Another fun Jell-O Cold War fact is that a Jell-O box played a tiny but crucial role in the Rosenberg espionage trial in 1951. Ethel Rosenberg’s brother testified that Julius Rosenberg had him use a Jell-O box (raspberry flavor) to identify the courier who would help them pass secrets to the Soviets. The brother and the courier each had part of the box. The box is now in the National Archives. 

What if the Soviets had eaten Jell-O, too? Would it have been as potent a symbol? Marjorie Garber has a whole chapter on this in her book Symptoms of Culture, but I have to admit, I don’t really understand it. 

There is a rich tradition of professors expounding on the cultural meaning of Jell-O. Jell-O represents motherhood, commercialism, the mutability of the American Dream, and death. (The Knox company initially made gloves and got into the gelatin game to find a use for the byproducts. I guess that is admirable?)

 In the words of one of these scholars:

In Jell-O, we are in the realm of food with no qualities, matter without form (ready to be molded), medium without content (avoid raw pineapple, which will sink), neither raw nor cooked (no refrigerator needed either, contrary to the popular misconception). Trying to define its special character is, as the saying goes, like “trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.”

This is what they teach you to do in grad school.

I have been digging away at my bowl of green Jell-O for a few hours now. It doesn’t really taste like limes. It tastes like sugar with a bit of an edge. At first I enjoyed the jiggling, but it was less entertaining once I started expecting to feel full and instead continued to feel hungry. And now I hate the taste of it. I guess that’s why people during the Depression put their leftovers into it. Even wilted vegetables would give it more substance. I wonder how bacon would taste if it were suspended inside? Or a hard-boiled egg? I don’t suppose people would have wasted food they actually enjoyed inside a bowl of lime Jell-O, no matter how aesthetically pleasing it might have been.

Now I am convinced that the only reason Jell-O still exists is because of its usefulness for medical purposes (EEGs, ballistics, food for the infirm, etc.). And so I beg the food chemists of America to invent another food that fulfills the same purposes that actually tastes good and is filling so we can put this substance to rest forever, except as a curiosity of 20th century America, like gas-guzzling cars with tail fins.

Yours,

Aimee

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Text message addendum submitted to Maggie from Aimee on May 2:

OMG, I forgot to include the Jell-O poem! (❤️ by me)

This is “dinner, 1933” by Charles Bukowski (❤️)

as it plopped
in the dish
the jello made
strange sounds,
almost fart-
like
sounds.
then came the
whipped cream,
mounds of it
on the
jello.

“ah! jello and
whipped cream!”

my father sucked the
jello and whipped
cream
off his spoon—
it sounded as if it
was entering a
wind
tunnel. (❤️)