The "Tom Thumb", Calves’ Foot Hair, Mrs May Wait, the Fridaire & General Foods Corp. Common Denominator: Jell-O.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 307

As a vegetarian of 16 years living in a house of life-long vegetarians, the antiquarian recipe that I stumbled upon in a "Lady's Book" (of 1885) called for scraping the hair from calves’ feet--it gave me consider pause.  But from such humble beginnings (like William S. Burroughs Naked Lunch grandfather’s small business bumping itself up and along to become IBM) are bigger things born.

And that’s been the story of Jell-O, a product of extraordinarily modest and not-pretty means, morphing itself and the Postum Company over a relatively short period of time (from 1895 to1925) into the megamonolth:  the General Foods Corporation.  “America’s Most Famous Dessert” got its third (or better) start on life in Le Roy, New York, under the creative hands of Mr. & Mrs. Pearle B. & May Wait (true!), who took sugar, powdered gelatin and artificial fruit flavors to make a concoction May called “Jell-O”.  But her reach was none-too-grand compared to that of Frank Woodward, who bought the company from her and created the demand for this ‘food” and who ultimately created General Foods with it.  (Its an old story:  consumable and sellable product with no consumers:  Marlboro cigarettes started out as a specialized cig for “ladies” and failed; the same cigarette was then re-marketed as a testosterone-laden product and then succeeded beyond all wild expectation, killing millions of its consumers in the process.)  In any event Ms. Wait trumped another New York state resident, Charles Knox,  in the race to develop a pretty and tasty  granulated/[powdered gelatin desert mix.  "Knox’s Gelatine", originally made with calves’-foot jelly, was a little earlier to the table than Mrs. Wait, but failed to properly develop his product. It also suffered its own "purity" by not having any sugar in it. 

Jell-O-like bits have been around for a long time—but creating this sort of  gelatin (and “delicacy”) was a time-consuming task, involving the above-mentioned scraping unpleasantness, long boiling of the scraped stuff, filtering and so on to achieve—once cooled and dried—sheets of clearish delight that would look like what we call Jell-O.  But as I said the history of this product is quite extended—for example there is a long Renaissance culinary sculpting history of gelatin, but that piece of history still awaits its vast chronicler.  And illustrator:  evidently the molds for the gelatin product were extensive and the creativity for its use boundless, with castles and communities and portraits being produced out of.  The use of gelatin as a binder and preservative is actually ancient, and finds itself at least as far back as ancient Greece. 

Our Tom Thumb connection with Jell-O  comes in the form of Peter Cooper, who   is generally seen as the American manufacturer of the first steam locomotive (The engine ran successfully on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad on August 28, 1830), and who (around 1845) was in fact very interested in processing different sorts of gelatin consumables in addition to creating the first locomotive, and also running for the presidency and many other things…the gelatin creation had to wait.

But the broadest brushwork on the developing history of Jell-O is that same brush that basically closed the American West and ended the cattle drive and most of the great Lonesome Dove cowboy traditions.  No, not barbed

wire—it was refrigeration.  The creation of refrigerated railroad cars meant that all that the cowboys needed to do was get their stock to a nearby railhead and modern technology would do the rest, the RR pulling the slaughtered stock to St. Louis or (more likely) Chicago, thus ending the Long Drive.  The home refrigerator enabled the creation of Jell-O much as we see it today.    (And I say that with as little inflection as possible, as hundreds of millions of people have enjoyed this sugary dried gelatin ensemble, so it must work to the good somewhere, at least as a cheap sugar delivery system)

As for me, if it isn't a liquid, I don't want the food on my plate to continue on in its own expectant dance after I get through moving it myself. I also don't want my food to behave like the coming-to-rest motion of a beloved (?) American TV icon.

But that doesn't mean that I can't take a moment here to stop and appreciate the bizarre connections between Jell-O and the Outside World. 

Visit the Jell-O Museum/Gallery HERE.

Comments

[Jeff]

A timely discussion, John, since McCain pointed out that nailing down Obama's tax proposals was like nailing Jello to the wall. But Jello is odious not only for being like tax proposals. Something about boiling down dead stuff. We're not talking chicken soup here. If a plant can get cheaper "feed" stock, will they? I'm hardly vegetarian (I ate the flesh of a little lamb yesterday at a Middle Eastern restaurant. What kind of Middle Eastern restaurant? I don't know.) but I did refuse to eat beef for a while in fear, anger, and protest about the whole Mad Cow thing ... a completely avoidable circumstance brought on by "market pressure." I.e., Greed. Sound familiar? No, I'm not ranting. Oh, and where does the glucosamine and condroitin in our joint pills come from? I don't worry about prions in the middle of the night, but I think about them sometimes when I eat a burger or take a little jello at a potluck. Must go take in the sudden thunder, lightning, and rain ... Auntie Em! Auntie Em!

[John Ptak]

You're right. I don't want to think about what goes into some medicines (especially for facial creams!) or how they're tested.(And what about the emulsifiers? You'd know about that stuff being a chemist and all Jeff.) The stuff at the Cow Factory and etc. that can't be used for anything else--and that is a very long list--is the stuff that is used in Jell-O. I don't know how it became a "good" idea to use a preserving agent for a foodstuff. It would certainly make good sense for the slaughterhouse/processing plant to not have to throw ANYTHING away, nothing, not even the gunk caught in the metal grids (that catch the chunky stuff) on the cutting floors. Certainly makes good sense there. But so far as eating the sugar-coated product of these sweepings, well, I dunno. Well, actually, I do know. I wonder how many times over you could fill Dorothy's house with the hooves used to manufacture a year's worth of Jell-O? I'm betting more than 100; but where does it stop, on what order of magnitude? (Now that would be an interesting visual display of quantitative data!)

[Jeff]

This Jello post is also uncomfortably close to the one on "Cashing out corpses." The Soylent Green generation is haunted by more than mushroom clouds. We don't just dry up like moths, unfortunately, so there's got to be an industry of some kind to get rid of us. When Laura was in Tibet with her sister in the '80s, they went to a sky burial (she had another word for it; can't recall) which is where the body is meticulously dissected and processed for the vultures that are always waiting nearby. You'll have to ask her for details. I don't remember how much detail they saw, other than the gathering of people and vultures.