I love the full-color cover with the bright yellow desserts and a salad that looks like a science textbook blowup of a microscopic organism that lives in freshwater ponds. The superfluous dash in Gel-Cookery and the scare quotes in "Over 40 ways to give that 'something special' touch to your meals with Knox desserts, salads, main dishes" also help ensure that I am in love with the cover.
Let's start off with a fancy, multilayered main dish to keep everyone cool at dinnertime.
First, lay down a luncheon-meat-and-mayo layer of gelatin, then once it's almost firm, top with a tomato-juice-and-hard-cooked-egg layer! It's like you told the cook you couldn't decide between a luncheon meat sandwich or an egg salad sandwich with tomato, hoping that she would find and offer a better alternative, and she just said, "Okay. How about both? In gelatin? Minus the bread?"
You'll need veggies to make it a meal, so why not keep the theme going by making them cold, jiggly, and disappointing too?
It sounds weird to have veggies suspended in barbecue-sauce-flavored gel, but apparently that used to be quite the thing. I'm intrigued that the molds for this one are supposed to be lined with Parmesan cheese. I wonder if that really helped with unmolding-- and what gel-soaked Parm tastes like. Seems like a waste of good cheese!
You're probably expecting a fruity gelatin for dessert, but I wanted to mess with your expectations, so I picked another gelatin-based recipe with an unlikely coating.
Wonder Marshmallows sound fairly unremarkable-- we're all familiar with marshmallows. You'll realize that this recipe calls for four cups of crushed corn flakes, though! They're used like the Parm in the previous recipe to coat the pan and make the marshmallows easier to remove. Then once they're out and cut, the little cubes of sugary, springy goodness are rolled in more corn flakes so they won't stick to each other. I really wonder how these would work. Would the flakes get soggy after a day or two? I'm also imagining someone dropping a couple marshmallows into a mug of hot cocoa and ending up with stray corn flake bits floating around in it. Of course, the hot cocoa will only come out once the cooler weather sets in, so I'll leave you imagining the first really chilly fall day, one spent with a mug of hot corn flakes. Maybe that will send a little shiver down your spine in the meantime.
These recipes remind me of a woman whose children thanked her for working when they were little. They knew that she would be so bored if she was a stay at home mom that their lives would be miserable. I can imagine all of the bored mothers whipping up endless complicated gelatin concoctions just so they would have something to do.
ReplyDeleteNow for the cornflake marshmallows, I could see the cornflakes on the bottom and side of the pan getting totally absorbed into the marshmallow goo before it hardened. If you really wanted to prank your friends, you should roll them in powdered sugar/cornstarch so they look totally normal on the outside, but then they have strange, gummy bits on the inside. If you think of how moist homemade marshmallows are, you know that the corn flakes will not stay crisp.
Yes, a lot of old recipes do seem to be at least in part a way to stave off boredom...
DeleteFor the marshmallows, if you really want to make sure the cornflakes are a surprise, you could pour half the marshmallow goo, top it off with the flakes, and then pour on the rest. If it's so runny when you put it in the pan that it completely engulfs the cornflakes, it might not be aerated enough. (It's been a long while since I made marshmallows, though, so I could be wrong.)
Good point about the marshmallow goo. Halloween is coming after all... a trick inside of a treat!
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