How Jell-O Salad Rose to Fame—and Fell From Favor

Whether from childhood, sick days or church potlucks, most Americans have memories involving Jell-O. For some families, recipes made with gelatin have been passed down through generations and are served at holiday dinners and other special occasions.

Of all the dishes made with gelatin, Jell-O salads—both sweet and savory—are probably the most misunderstood. Recipes combining gelatin with ingredients like sauerkraut, beets, hard-boiled eggs, tuna and generous dollops of mayonnaise might seem baffling today, but these quirky creations were once incredibly popular.

As it turns out, Jell-O salad is more than just a controversial food—it offers a window into 20th-century American culture.

Pearle Bixby Wait invented Jell-O in 1897. While other gelatin products were on the market, they were bland and boring. Wait transformed the food by adding colors and fruit flavors like raspberry, lemon, orange and strawberry. His wife, May, gave the iconic dessert its name, says Tyler Angora, curator of the LeRoy Historical Society, home to the Jell-O Gallery Museum. 

But Wait struggled to get Jell-O off the ground, so he sold the company to Orator Woodward—the owner of the Genesee Pure Food Company—for $450 in 1899. Woodward also struggled to market the product until he placed an advertisement in the June 1902 issue of the Ladies Home Journal, where it was promoted nationally as “a delicious and healthful dessert.” 

That was the first in a long line of successful Jell-O advertising campaigns.

“Orator transformed the world of food marketing with how he brought Jell-O to the world by marketing it with kids and parents, directed towards women, specifically,” Angora explains. “But what really drew people in were the very colorful designs and the iconography of children with their moms making Jell-O."

Jell-O really took off in 1904, when Woodward got the idea to produce recipe booklets and distribute them in small towns, Angora explains. Employees at Jell-O—many of whom were women—developed these recipes in the company’s laboratory in LeRoy. In addition to promoting the Jell-O food product, “Woodward included different molds and salads and accompaniments for foods and desserts in the recipe books," Angora says.

Gelatin dishes had typically required household staff to carry out the various steps of the process. Unlike earlier forms of gelatin, which were laborious to make—and involved rendering collagen from animal bones and then clarifying it—Jell-O was always instant. “What made it so revolutionary is that anybody could make it,” Angora says. “It was a cheaper alternative to the higher-class desserts and kind of leveled the playing field."

Jell-O is also quintessentially American. When immigrants came through Ellis Island, they would be given Jell-O with their meals, Angora notes. People associated Jell-O with their new home country and started cooking with it themselves—including making gelatin salads.

Jell-O salad refers to a dish that combines gelatin with fruits, vegetables or meats, often topped with something creamy, like cottage cheese, whipped cream or mayonnaise. It can either be sweet and served for dessert, or savory and served as a meal or side dish. 

“The tidiest and most thorough way to package a salad was to mold it in gelatin,” wrote Laura Shapiro in her 1986 book Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. Unlike unwieldy piles of lettuce and toppings, salad made with gelatin was, as she put it, “a salad at last in control of itself."

The first popular gelatin salad, known as Perfection Salad—an aspic (savory gelatin) filled with finely chopped cabbage, celery and red pepper—didn’t involve the Jell-O brand at all. Rather, it was the third-place winner of a 1904 recipe contest hosted by the Knox Gelatine Company, which had introduced the world's first commercially successful granulated unflavored gelatin in 1889.

Recipes for sweet gelatin salads—like Peach Delight and Strawberry Dessert—appeared in Jell-O's first recipe book in 1904. The following year’s edition included recipes for savory salads, including their take on chicken salad (made with lemon Jell-O) and Manhattan salad (lemon Jell-O with apples, walnuts and celery served on lettuce leaves with mayonnaise). 

Initially, recipes for Jell-O salad were created for wealthier consumers, allowing them to impress and delight their guests. This coincided with the height of the domestic science movement—also known as “home economics”—which applied scientific principles and new technologies to make household management more efficient.

By World War I and into the 1920s, Jell-O was advertising to all classes, Angora says. “Both the advertising and recipes made a point of demonstrating that Jell-O was so easy to make that anyone could do it, and you could mix in other ingredients to create new dishes,” he explains. Gelatin salads became especially popular during the Great Depression, as they provided a way to stretch every fruit, vegetable or piece of protein as far as possible to feed a family.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Jell-O salad was sometimes considered a status symbol, because it meant a household likely had a refrigerator. While it was possible for Jell-O to set in an icebox, the process was much easier and more consistent with mechanical refrigeration. For this reason, “Jell-O remained elusive for the most remote rural women until well into the 1950s,” Kathleen Norris wrote in her 1993 book, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography.

The 1950s were the golden age of Jell-O salad, when these whimsical dishes were part of postwar homemaking and home entertaining culture. “The 1950s is when that life simplification started happening with all of the appliances coming into the world. Where after the war, the baby boom, life is just moving fast,” Angora says. “Jell-O was very appealing because it was quick and easy—you could just throw it together and put fruit or your savories in and have a dessert or additive to dinner.”

Although Jell-O salads were still eaten throughout the 1960s and 1970s, they began to lose their luster. Savory gelatin salads largely fell out of favor during the 1970s—though some people continue to enjoy them today. “The [people of the] Midwest are still probably the biggest consumers of Jell-O,” Angora says. “It's huge in the South, too, because it gets awfully hot in those regions and Jell-O is a cool dessert."

In 1972, even renowned chef James Beard wrote that the “jellied salad”—which he described as “without question an American innovation"—still does “have its delights."