There are many who
say American boys fought World War II to preserve mom’s apple
pie. They may have gone to war to preserve a dessert but it wasn’t
mom’s apple pie.
It was mom’s jello.
(Jello is the common
name; Jell-O is the name on the box.)
More moms made jello,
and more often, than they did apple pie. It was so simple to make
anybody could do it. Except husbands. I never knew a husband to
make jello. I never did and I have been an experienced husband
and father more than 50 years. Maybe it’s because you can’t make
jello in a microwave oven.
It didn’t matter if
you were Catholic, Protestant or Jewish. Your mom nurtured you
on jello. Muslim kids, though, were jello-deprived. A Muslim relative
of mine said she wasn’t allowed jello because one of the ingredients
of gelatin is calve’s hoof, which is a no-no.
My mom, though an immigrant
from Russia, made jello in all its permutations. Plain—cherry,
strawberry, lemon, lime—or plain topped with cream or whipped
cream, with canned crushed pineapple or canned fruit salad with
pecans or whipped before it set with one of those hand beaters
that antedated the blender. Whipped, it took on a different look
and a different texture, sort of frothy. She even tried lime Jell-O
as salad, with celery and stuff and mayonnaise. It was not a hit.
My wife, who is a better cook than my mom was, was big on jello,
too, when our sons were growing up. They never went to war over
it, though.
Though I was born before
a lot of things were invented—Dairy Queen, frozen yogurt,
Hadacol and radio or television—there never was a time there
was no jello. So I looked it up.
Jello had its beginnings
in 1847 when Peter Cooper patented a gelatin dessert. It languished
52 years until a carpenter named Pearl Ward in Leroy, New York,
added flavors to the mix—strawberry, raspberry, lemon and
lime— and his wife, May, named it Jell-O. Didn’t help profits
much. Sales were so bad he sold the whole shebang to a man named
Woodward, who had founded something called the Genesee Pure Food
Company, for $450. Sales were still so bad Woodward tried to sell
the business to his plant supervisor for $35. No deal. But then
sales picked up and by 1902 after a campaign of three-inch ads
in Ladies’ Home Journal calling Jell-O "America’s Most Famous
Dessert" they shot to $250,000.
Jell-O was launched.
During World War I,
the makers of Jell-O pointed with pride to the fact that while
the price of almost everything had risen, you could still buy
their product for ten cents. In the early years of the 1900s,
arrivals at Ellis Island were treated to Jell-O as a 'Welcome
To America.'
In the Roaring Twenties,
Jell-O introduced recipes for Jellied Manhattan Salad and Egg
Slices en Gelle, which I don’t think went over too well. I don’t
recall my mom ever making them, or an of my friends’ moms doing
it, either. Norman Rockwell was one of the artists doing Jell-O
ads and the company that made it changed its name to the Jell-O
Company. The business was soon worth $67 million.
In the Thirties, the
advent of electric refrigerators boosted the shivery dessert and
Jell-O sponsored a "Wizard of Oz" radio program, with Frank L.
Baum producing a series of children’s "Wizard of Oz" booklets.
And in 1934 Jack Benny went on the air for the sticky, wobbly
stuff. He signed on for ten years with, "Jell-O again." Bing and
Dixie Lee Crosby recorded a song called A Fine Romance
for Decca with a line that said, You take romance, I’ll take
Jell-O, and in 1942 Jell-O pudding sponsored Kate Smith on
radio. The dessert got into television in the Fifties, advertising
on six shows, including Roy Rogers and Bob Hope. Just about everybody
knows Bill Cosby is the TV spokesman for Jell-O but do you know
how long he’s been at it? Since 1974, that’s how long. Now that
is a romance.
Nineteen eighty-four
was a lean year for the company but they wanted it that way. They
introduced sugar-free Jell-O Gelatin. And all those years I’d
been thinking jello was already a diet food.
In 1991, the Smithsonian
Institution staged a conference on Jell-O history, featuring a
Jell-O Jell-Off Cooking Contest. Which sounds strange to me. I
never thought making jello involved a whole lot of cooking skill.
Maybe it’s the way you heat the water.
In 1996 it was launched
into space. When a mom named Shannon Lucid whose day job was astronaut
went on a mission to the Russian Mir space station, she took Jell-O
with her and served it to the Russian astronauts as an Easter
treat. They loved it.
Today more 400 million
boxes of Jell-O are sold in the US every day and that’s not chopped
liver. They have a lot of other flavors, though.
David Westheimer lives
with his wife of 55 years, Dody, in the same Los Angeles apartment
they moved into from Houston, Texas 39 years ago. Their son, Fred,
is a Senior Vice-President at the William Morris Agency and his
younger brother, Eric, is a veterinarian. Succeeding generations
include five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. As a journalist,
David worked for Oveta Culp Hobby. At 83, David Westheimer continues
to write, and not just for Senior Women. His latest effort, "The
Great Wounded Bird", his recollections of World War II, winner
of the Texas Review 1999 poetry prize, was published this year
by Texas Review Press and may be ordered from Amazon Books, where
it is 1,458,159th on their sales list, from Barnes & Noble and
Borders Books. He is a novelist and a retired Air Force Officer.
He can be reached for a repertoire of feigned curmudgeonly remarks
at: DWestheime@aol.com.
