Vintage Gelatin Mold Recipes

Some things go great together: Peanut butter & chocolate; strawberries & cream; Siskel & Ebert. Other things, while great on their own, should never be combined: Pizza & ice cream; Ebert & Roeper; lime gelatin and salmon.

Oh, you remember those gelatin mold recipes from your past, don’t you? I don’t actually remember anyone eating one, but whenever the neighborhood would throw a pot luck, someone was sure to bring a Jell-O mold. And sure enough, it’d awkwardly sit untouched among the piles of empty casserole containers, pie tins, and Dixie cups. As the evening wore on and people started to leave, everyone would take a small portion of it home and promised to “have it for lunch” the next day.

As the ’60s turned into the ’70s, it felt like these recipes were getting more creatively disgusting. Every month, mom was mixing unholy concoctions of seafood, fruit flavored gelatin, meatloaf, eye of newt, baboon’s blood, and what was surely witches’ tears in the hopes of channeling her inner Julia Child. Sometimes she hit the spot: The strawberry and Cool Whip molds were always flavorful, but most of the time, her molds looked and tasted more like a creature begging for the Old Yeller treatment.