There’s Always Room for (Somebody’s) Jell-O

Just when I thought we’d heard the last of gelatin desserts and Jell-O, along comes an Epicurious e-mail last week enthusing about the Gelatina de Mosaico by chef Esteban Castillo. The headline trumpeted: “Looks Like Terazzo, Tastes Like a Dream.”  And it would look something like the one pictured above. Furthermore, the Epicurious recipe ranks it at 3.5 out of 4. But here’s the thing. I’s almost the same as my grandmother’s Broken Glass Pie, a recipe that has to date back to the late 1960s.

And if I told you that it was three different Jell-O flavors and Cool Whip, you’d laugh me off the stage. But Chef Castillo also uses three packaged gelatin desserts (yes, that’s Jell-O), but he makes a gelatina de leche out of whole milk, condensed milk, half-and-half, and unflavored gelatin. Both call for cutting the various prepared Jell-Os into cubes, mixing those cubes in a single dish, and then adding a cream/gelatin mix to hold it all together. My grandmother made her own pie crust or graham cracker crust, but Chef Castillo simply puts his in a baking pan coated with cooking spray so that once firm, the dessert can be inverted and cut into cubes.

Castillo refers to this class of desserts as gelatinas. And he says his mother pointed out to him that they are inexpensive and include a handful of ingredients that you probably have in your pantry, not to mention that they feed a large group and travel well. My grandmother Isabelle would agree. She relied on gelatin desserts and salads for crowd meals.

So what’s the difference? Modern logistics. If you search for best gelatin recipes today, you’ll find that most recipes use plain gelatin with fruits, fruit juices, and other more healthful ingredients. But when my grandmother was making her Broken Glass Pie, it was particularly difficult to get good fruits other than perhaps bananas, lemons, and occasionally oranges. So most pantries in that time and location had a selection of different boxes of Jell-O. And many of those Jell-O dishes included canned fruit – peaches, pears, or fruit cocktail.

So the lesson here is that we maybe shouldn’t look down our noses at those forgotten Jell-O dishes. Chef Castillo has proven that they deserve a second look. Just ask his mother. How about you? Are you game to try something with Jell-O? Or to make your own gelatin dessert?

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