Aspics and jell-o salads

It used to be made with actual sugar and was genuinely a good desert food, instead of a gross slimy goo.

Mother whips up a shrimp aspic around Thanksgiving/Christmas, though hasn't done so as of late.

Don't know exactly what's in it, though I know it involves gelatin, shrimp, tomato soup and celery. It's a legit mid-century-modern housewife recipe, handed down.

It's more like a spread than a Jello. I always enjoyed it on Triscuits.

>>8371692
Take another look at the image.

It's got shrimp in it... olives... tomatoes... and chunks of fucking cheese.

>>8371697
Stranger combinations of food have been found to be delicious.
Not by much, but still.

>>8371697
>shrimp

That's celery.

>>8371705
I don't see very well, but that still sounds bad.

>>8371694
It isn't awful?

>>8371725
No, I enjoy it quite a bit.

It's basically a nice savory spread.

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>jell-o salad
pfft

A lot of these outlandish 50s-70s dishes were just invented by marketing depts once they figured out housewives were easy targets for advertising. "You, too could be the talk of the next dinner party, if you cook with Jello(tm)." Taste was never a concern, and yes, most of it is mediocre to bad, yet their efforts were still so successful that there now exists an entire wing of traditional American cooking that coincidentally revolves around specific packaged products. The Campbells(tm) Cream of Mushroom green bean caserole, for example.
One of the ugliest faces of consumerism desu

Looking at julia childs cookbook it seems a lot of aspic dishes used stocks with added gelatine and not just jello like the anons ITT are saying. Still it looks pretty unappealing and I don't doubt that countless children had to suffer from their mothers incompetent attempts at short cutting the stock/jelly preparation.

It might have to do with the lingering effects of WW2 rationing? Sort of like how some candy companies started making chocolate taste more like vomit because soldiers were used to the crappy ones they got, spending a good portion of your life having to live on cheap substitutes (which Jell-O/gelatin was a good portion of) instead of actually good food can cause someone to linger more on crap like this.

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My mom still makes it.

Personally not a fan.

Aspic is a savory French dish that fills the gap between a meat stew and a meatloaf. The gel matrix is nothing more than a concentrated stock (the same gelatin in lower concentration is what gives stews their characteristic thickness).

Using powdered gelatin (Jello) significantly reduces the time and skill required to create the dish, at the expense of being significantly blander.

I haven't had it but I suspect fruit suspended in a jello matrix wouldn't be too different from artificially flavored jello or a fruit salad.

Where it gets weird is all the stupid recipes that do unappetizing combinations of the two.

>>8371936
Yeah maybe so. I just found out about the vomit-tasting chocolate in the US recently when I wound up reading about butyric acid. Pretty strange to me, I'm from Canada and here Hershey's for example doesn't add it to their chocolate at all, so it tastes very different compared to what those from the US know.

>>8371975
I can't even right now

>>8372015
Wouldn't the meat in the gelatin be like near ice cold though? It sounds disgusting...

>>8371757
This
Based head cheese has gelatin as a binder. It's great for texture.