JELL-O Recipe Booklet – 1932

Description

This is a JELL-O recipe book from 1932. It contains 24 pages and measures approximately 4 x 5.75 inches. It contains numerous recipes and color illustrations.
Jell-O is a registered trademark of Kraft Foods for varieties of gelatin desserts (fruit-flavored gels), puddings and no-bake cream pies. The original Jell-O gelatin dessert (genericized as jello) is the signature of the brand.
The original gelatin dessert began in Le Roy, New York, in 1881 after Pearle Bixby Wait and his wife May trademarked the name for a product made from strawberry, raspberry, orange or lemon flavoring added to sugar and granulated gelatin, which had been patented in 1845 in its powdered form. The dessert was especially popular in the 1930s and 1950s.
In 1897, Wait trademarked Jell-O. In 1899, Jell-O was sold to Orator Francis Woodward, whose Genesee Pure Food Company produced the successful Grain-O health drink. Part of the legal agreement between Woodward and Wait dealt with the similar Jell-O name.
Various elements were key to Jell-O becoming a mainstream product: new technologies, such as refrigeration; powdered gelatin and machine packaging; home economics classes; and the company's marketing.
Initially Woodward struggled to sell the powdered product. Beginning in 1902, to raise awareness, Woodward's Genesee Pure Food Company placed advertisements in the Ladies' Home Journal proclaiming Jell-O to be "America's Most Famous Dessert." Jell-O was a minor success until 1904, when Genesee Pure Food Company sent armies of salesmen into the field to distribute free Jell-O cookbooks, a pioneering marketing tactic. Within a decade, three new flavors, chocolate (discontinued in 1927), cherry and peach, were added, and the brand was launched in Canada.
Celebrity testimonials and recipes appeared in advertisements featuring actress Ethel Barrymore and opera singer Ernestine Schumann-Heink. Some Jell-O illustrated advertisements were painted by Maxfield Parrish.
In 1923, the newly rechristened Jell-O Company launched D-Zerta, an artificially sweetened version of Jell-O. Two years later, Postum and Genesee merged, and in 1927 Postum acquired Clarence Birdseye's frozen foods company to form the General Foods Corporation.
By 1930, there appeared a vogue in American cuisine for congealed salads, and the company introduced lime-flavored Jell-O to complement the add-ins that cooks across the country were combining in these aspics and salads. Popular Jell-O recipes often included ingredients like cabbage, celery, green peppers and even cooked pasta.
By the 1950s, salads became so popular that Jell-O responded with savory and vegetable flavors such as celery, Italian, mixed vegetable and seasoned tomato. These flavors have since been discontinued.
In 1934, Jell-O made comedian Jack Benny the dessert's spokesperson.
At this time General Foods introduced a jingle that was familiar over several decades, in which the spelling "J-E-L-L-O" was (or could be) sung over a rising five-note musical theme. The jingle was written by Don Bestor, who was the bandleader for Jack Benny on his radio program.
In 1936, chocolate returned to the Jell-O lineup, as an instant pudding made with milk. It proved enormously popular, and over time other pudding flavors were added such as vanilla, tapioca, coconut, pistachio, butterscotch, egg custard, flan and rice pudding.
Jell-O became an affordable ornamental ingredient that women were able to use to create feminine, light, delicate dishes that were the standard of refined tea time fare during the 1920s-1950s. By the Jazz Age nearly one-third of salad recipes in an average cookbook were gelatin-based recipes including varied fillings of fruit, vegetables or even cream cheese.
The baby boom saw a significant increase in sales for Jell-O. Young mothers didn't have the supporting community structures of earlier generations, so marketers were quick to promote easy-to-prepare prepackaged foods. By this time, creating a Jell-O dessert required simply boiling water, combining the water with Jell-O, and putting the mixture into Tupperware molds and refrigerating it for a short time.
New flavors were continually added and unsuccessful flavors were removed: in the 1950s and 1960s, apple, black cherry, black raspberry, grape, lemon-lime, mixed fruit, orange-banana, pineapple-grapefruit, blackberry, strawberry-banana, tropical fruit, and more intense "wild" versions of the venerable strawberry, raspberry, and cherry.