Saving the world with gelatin!

The bank account is probably feeling pretty low lately... Grocery prices... Holiday gifts, food etc. The Ghoulies II promo inflatable toilet o' monsters you just couldn't resist on eBay, even though you were already aware of the grocery prices and holiday splurges. (And no, I don't actually own one of them. I'm just thinking of the kind of stuff I'd like to blow my money on to make the post funnier. So if you happen to own an extra one and you'd be willing to let it go for lower-than-eBay prices...) What I'm trying to say is managing money is hard.

But luckily, we can look back at "Knox's Ration-Stretcher Recipes" (undated, but likely from 1943-1945, obviously!) as a way to help stretch our dollars (rather than ration coupons).

If you're shocked by the price of butter, then Knox Spread will make an good substitute. (At least, if Knox is to be trusted with such a proclamation, which I doubt... And also, note that it's a spread. I wouldn't try baking with it!) Double your butter (or margarine, if you want to go even cheaper!) with some Knox gelatin and evaporated milk.

And if you pack it into a lovely glass dish, maybe people will see how much work you put into making the spread and refrain from complaining about how un-butter-like it tastes.

(Of course, now it would be both easier and cheaper to just buy the cheapest margarine sticks and call it a day than to buy gelatin and evaporated milk to add to the base butter. Hello, Imperial!)

Knox's other big idea is the one I write about way more often: using gelatin to help preserve leftover bits! The Basic Vegetable Salad promises "Odds and ends of vegetables transformed into a treat."

You can tell they're serious about using up leftovers, as the vegetable component is very vaguely described: "1-1/2 cups of diced or shredded vegetables (raw or cooked)." Pretty much anything hanging out in the fridge is fair game.

If you want your mold's veggie innards to be slightly more obscured, the Basic Tomato Jelly might be the better choice. Plus it's "A real treat-- brimming with vitamins."

This one can even stretch a cup of diced cooked meat to help serve six people.

Of course, trying to save money this way at the end of 2025 is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Deleting your eBay account and staying away from anything that shows targeted advertisements is probably going to be more effective at helping you save money than trying to stretch everything you eat with gelatin... But at least it's good to know people made it through tough times before, and we can do it again. (Or maybe the world will just implode. Who knows? We could all just be ingested by a gelatinous blob from outer space with the way things have been going.) Here's hoping 2026 will be an improvement!