How Jell-O Changed The Definition Of Salads In The 20th Century

Most people probably have some idea of what a salad is: A mix of various raw vegetables, usually a base of greens, with extras like beets or cherry tomatoes. (And America's favorite dressing: ranch, if you're feeling it.) Alternatively, a salad can consist of some kind of cold food (as found in a leveled-up potato salad or maybe a macaroni salad) tossed with a whole bunch of mayonnaise. If you consult the handy Merriam-Webster dictionary, these are, indeed, two of the definitions you'll find. But at the end of the second definition, there's a little tidbit about all the salad fixings being suspended in jiggly gelatin. 

What, like Jell-O? Are we suspending little hot dogs in Jell-O molds like housewives in the '50s? Didn't we leave that in the middle of the 20th century where it belonged? Well, for the most part, yes, but that particular definition of a salad still lingers in places like the dictionary, along with a wiggly renaissance on social media.

Salads as we know them (potato salad, dandelion salad, fruit salad, etc.) have existed for centuries, but it wasn't until the 1900s when Jell-O salads became a thing. Gelatin had been used in cooking well before the 20th century — going back to medieval Europe, in fact — but it was considered a luxury. Gathering gelatin from the bones of cattle was a tedious, time-consuming task, and nobody without an enormous staff of servants even bothered. The elite families of New York and the antebellum South would serve jelly as a flex (including Thomas Jefferson at Monticello), but that was about it — at least until the invention of instant gelatin and the popularization of Jell-O.

Now, not only could a tasty dessert be made in very little time, but leftovers could be encased in Jell-O and made to last longer. With concerns about food safety rising in prominence in the early 20th century, it was also seen as a safer, cleaner alternative to anything you'd get from the butcher or the general store. With the Great Depression forcing families to stretch food as far as it could go, Jell-O (and its savory cousin, aspic) rose even further in popularity. There were chicken salad olive molds, bundt-shaped tomato aspic with veggies, and plenty more.

The surge of instant food products after World War II made cooking easier than ever. As unappetizing as most of them might seem to the modern palate, they were well-received. But even though homemakers could use instant products to feed their families in a jiffy, that doesn't necessarily mean they were encouraged to. There was a stigma against leaning heavily on instant products, and home cooks were expected to put a great deal of effort into preparing meals — or risk being seen as lazy. 

So what did they do? Well, they could cook from scratch — or, they could take the instant products and gussy them up with over-the-top presentations. Various branded cookbooks encouraged this practice, with Jell-O salad and aspic remaining popular vehicles for ... well, all sorts of things. From lime green Jell-O salad with cottage cheese and pineapple to ham Jell-O salad with cabbage and mayo, the sky was the limit. As people grew more health-conscious, the definition of "salad" drifted towards the bowl of greens we know today. But gelatin salads still loom large in our imagination, if not our nightmares, too.