Woodward was a natural salesman, and he had settled in the right place. Eventually, in 1899, he gave up and sold the trademark - name, hyphen, and all - to Orator Frank Woodward, a local businessman. Was this new jelly a salad ingredient or a dessert?įor two years, Wait kept trying to stir up interest in Jell-O, with little success. Kitchen traditions were still based on Victorian recipes, where every food type had its place. Jell-O was too foreign a food and too unknown a brand for turn-of-the-century consumers.

They boxed it up to sell.īut it didn't sell. To distance the stuff further from its abattoir origins, his wife, May, renamed it Jell-O. Colorful, light, and delightful to play with, it was a treat that could add jiggly, translucent fun to almost any meal. The jelly took on the color and flavor of the fruits - orange, lemon, raspberry, and strawberry - creating something that looked, smelled, and tasted appealing. But Wait thought that preflavored gelatins might sell better, so he mixed in fruit juices, along with sugar and food dyes. Earlier efforts to sell prepackaged powdered gelatin, including by the inventor of the process, Peter Cooper (of Cooper Union fame), sold it plain and unflavored on the argument that this was the most flexible form cooks could add their own flavors. Wait wondered if there might be a way to take gelatin more mainstream. For good reason: It was a lot of work for a pretty small reward.

Although glue-makers had been producing it for decades as a by-product of their animal rendering, it had yet to prove popular with American consumers. The carpenter with a side business of patent medicine packaging had been wanting to get into the then-new packaged foods business and thought this might be the stuff, if only he could figure out how to make it more appealing. In 1895, Pearle Wait sat at his kitchen table poking at a bowl of gelatin. We don't think much about the origins of Jell-O today, but in the late 1800s, if you wanted to put a jiggly treat on your dinner table, you had to make it the hard way: putting off-cuts in a stewpot and waiting a half day for the hydrolyzed collagen to emerge from the gristle. A clean powder in a packet, far removed from its abattoir origins of marrow and connective tissue. But if you collect enough of it and purify it, adding color and flavor, it becomes something else: Jell-O. It's the translucent, glutinous substance that skims to the top when you boil meat. There's no getting around it: Gelatin comes from flesh and bones.

Free by chris anderson