Jell-O what?

The other day, my colleague left for his annual Thanksgiving break, and this time was flying home to Texas and then on to Delaware with the family. Whilst I am very happy he had such a lovely trip ahead, I am also a tad miffed, for I look forward to the leftovers and 'Tales from the Thanksgiving Table’. Last year was the first time I had tried Candied Yams, complete with marshmallows, and this year I was looking forward to yet stranger offerings, for he had told me of apocryphal traditional dishes such as green bean casserole, and I wanted to try them. (The recipe and picture below, for Candied yams, from Recipekey.com, is very similar to the recipe I made).

One of the things I love about our autumnal festivities is that, by and large, they are more to do with giving thanks and nature’s bounty than they are materialism. They hark back to a time before religion as we know it, to an entrenched, paganistic need to thank the land for what it’s given us. Sure, the shops fill with all manner of the brightly coloured, orange, black, green and purple, with the odd ghostly white thrown in for good measure – and they convince us that Halloween is about buckets to collect sweets in, and pumpkin candles and the like. That’s true to a degree, but the best parties are always the ones where the witches and skeleton costumes are home-made out of old tights and bin bags, and the food is made with creativity and a well-developed sense of the macabre. It’s too easy to buy it all, and I think that the desire to craft our own Halloween is deep within us – it’s about physically exorcising the bad through our own creativity. It’s about taking what we have and making the best of it, about thanking the earth, and celebrating the bounty of nature. The day I see ready-carved pumpkins in the shops will be the day I know that commercialism has started to win, but whilst people are still slicing awkward triangles for eyes, there is hope.

Thanksgiving is typical of an autumnal feast day. Again, the shops start with the fancy tableware and napkins, but it is still mainly about people you love gathering together over food and giving thanks. Although it’s principally an American tradition, as is the way with Americana, it is seeping into the British psyche. And as is the way with the British psyche, we have a tendency to assimilate the best of cultures that come to our shores. We have been doing it since the Roman times, and probably before that. If there’s a knees-up to be had, we will go and pray for a few weeks in the new-fangled temple prior to the big day if it means we get invited to the party. Why should Thanksgiving be any different? More and more people I personally know are having thanksgiving meals. At a time when churches are emptying out quicker than a JD Sports during a riot, we seem to be tail-gating the tradition as a kind of proxy-harvest festival. And so it is that all is not lost, for another friend who cooks Thanksgiving every year for a variety of ex-pat Americans plugged the festive gap for me in a rather surprising way.

Whilst in a frenzy of activity at my desk the other day (ahem), she sidled up to me and asked ‘Jen, what's the UK equivalent of Coolwhip?’. I immediately assumed the now defunct frozen Superwhip would be our closest equivalent, or Birds Dream Topping (now there's a misnomer if ever there was one), and then I wondered why on earth she wanted a substitute for a cream substitute? Was that not just cream? I tried in as diplomatic a way as possible to ask the question without sounding like I was calling her an idiot (for she is not, she is a highly intelligent young lady, which only served to further confuse me) and as she explained, all became clear. The delightful dish she was to be creating with her Coolwhip? Jell-O Salad.

Any Americans amongst my readers (oh how I flatter myself I am read globally) will instantly know what Jell-O Salad is. However to the uneducated Brit, it is alien. In the UK, we have been led to believe that thanksgiving dinner is just like Christmas dinner – roast turkey and all the trimmings. It is true, it is a feast dish, and is based around the native American turkey, roasted and dressed, with a variety of vegetable dishes served alongside. That, broadly speaking, would describe thanksgiving dinner. But in reality, the meal can be very different.

Let’s start with the turkey. Even cooking methods are different in some cases, though still by and large roasted. More and more, these days, according to a recent survey I saw, the most popular method, in fact, is to barbecue them outside. Traditionally, in the UK, we stuff the neck and the cavity with sage and onion, or if you are my mother, apricot and almond sausagement in the bird, with sage, onion and chestnut stuffing balls done separately (in America separate stuffing cooked outside the bird is 'dressing'). We dress and decorate the bird in a variety of garbs and unguents, principally streaky bacon but for those with rather more developed tastebuds and purses, pancetta, and anoint the skin with butter, push butter under the skin, indeed inject butter into the flesh to prevent that traditional turkey travesty, the over-cooked breast - basically as much butter as possible will counteract the long, dehydrating bake in the oven. In recent years we have taken to brining as a way of encouraging moistness. The Americans, however, take yet another tack. Some people like to deep fry their birds (yup), even having specialised fryers for the very purpose, and they would more than likely serve their cornbread ‘dressing’ separately, having reconstituted it in a pan first on the stove-top.

Then we come on to the real crazy stuff – the accompaniments.
The one perhaps the brits are most familiar with, thanks to the wonderful Nigella, is the aforementioned Candied Yams topped with marshmallows. I know – I hear a nation dry-heave. But this is, for the carb-addicted, sweet-toothed amongst you, simply fabulous. The sweetness of the potatoes with the spice from the cinnamon and the crispy, caramel vanilla of the marshmallow is just like velvet duvets of unctuousness on the tongue that complements the briny turkey beautifully. I know this for a fact as this was the first thing I ever tried in ‘Tales from the Thanksgiving Table’, and I have since made it myself several times. This one gets a tick.
The next is the apocryphal green bean casserole. Now – what do you think of when you hear the word casserole? A base of onions, celery and carrot, fried off, a touch of garlic and then some decent stock added to a mix of flavourful veg and meat, a splash of wine, all waiting to be cooked long and slow?
That is everything green bean casserole is not.
Green Bean Casserole is a mixture of canned or frozen green beans (obviously), Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, and crispy fried onions (from a packet). Note I name the brand of soup – that is because Green Bean Casserole was invented in 1955 by Dorcas Reilly, Campbell's head chef, on behalf of Campbell’s soup, utilising specifically only store cupboard ingredients.
The next accompaniment was what totally bemused me. The first time my friend told me of it, I thought she had had a Rachel moment – you know? The one where the cookery book gets stuck together and she makes shepherds pie trifle? This is the recipe which started my brief foray into this American Thanksgiving dinner piece: The Jell-O Salad.
Imagine, if you will, a concoction of lime Jell-O (Jell-O in America is, I am led to believe, the powdered variety), that is then mixed with Coolwhip, and cottage cheese.
And then served with the turkey!
When my friend told me that her American friends mother had given her the recipe (where, if you couldn’t get it, the lime Jell-O could be substituted with strawberry) and then served alongside your beautifully burnished and bronzed roasted bird, I simply didn’t believe it. It was a little like the first time I learnt of the nuts and bolts of having sex. I was about 8 years old, and my friends older sister had given us the cold hard facts about what went where. I simply did not believe it. This was in the days before Google, I hasten to add – now, I would be given pictorial evidence in nanoseconds.
Thus it was with Jell-O salad. Too outlandish to even dream that this was a real recipe. The recipe that I found most outlandish was one that combined cucumber, onion, horseradish, and pineapple with cottage cheese and strawberry Jell-O. I know our American cousins have a sweet tooth, but really? (See below picture from ourfamilyrecipes.blogspot.com for an example of the mystifying concoction - I think I prefer the idea of vanilla pudding in it)

I got to wondering whether this was something that was perhaps viewed in the same way we view sprouts or Christmas pud – a tradition to be endured? The real issue with sprouts and Christmas pud, however, is not that they are inherently vile – it’s that they are cooked badly, by and large. Christmas pudding, I have discovered in recent years, is actually sublime when gently steamed after months of maturing. It's not great, however, microwaved to oblivion. Sprouts boiled until grey are, and never were, representative of cruciferous greatness. Therefore could this Jell-O salad perhaps fall into the same ranks of ‘we make it that way because, well, we just do’?
A straw poll amongst those I know from the North American continent confirmed otherwise. They make it because they like it. Pure and simple. They cannot hang a nations shame on the ‘tradition’ peg. Or so they say.
Although these dishes don’t really hark back to the time of the pilgrim fathers (unless jet-puffed marshmallow and condensed cream of mushroom soup was prevalent in Plymouth), they still tell a story of Americana, but more a modern, industrial history, where the housewife started working and time was tight. Where we had learnt new ways to mass produce and store food. The thing that my friend found most alarming was that her American guests, upon finding her one year in a sweaty, exhausted, red-cheeked heap upon arrival, howled with sympathetic laughter at the effort that she had gone to. The pumpkin pie was home-made, the flesh cooked and pulped, pie crust blind baked; the cornbread stuffing was made with actual cornbread that had been baked for the sole purpose of the stuffing. The cranberry sauce had been made from scratch. The Americans found this hilarious, but also inauthentic. They gave her the name of a lovely little American shop near Bagshot where she could purchase Keebler pie crust, Libby’s canned Pumpkin, genuine Jell-O, Frenchs Fried Onions and Aunt Jemima’s cornbread stuffing mix, amongst a variety of other pre-packaged, dessicated and dehydrated thanksgiving staples to be reconstituted at a (much) later date. This year, everything came out of a packet. Hell, this year, they even sold the stuff on Ocado! And do you know what? Her guests all said that, this year, it was just like momma used to make. Do you know why? Because it was.

The real thanksgiving story is a mix of harvest rituals, historical pride and religious traditions – Native American, British, Dutch, Canadian and other nations. It is perhaps still being crafted. We live in an age of plenty in the western world, thanks to the greatest industrialised nation on the planet, one that has formulated a way to ensure that food is plentiful for its population, even if not always exactly fresh. What the blogosphere demonstrates is that there are plenty of Americans out there blazing a trail for the home-cooked, the locally produced and the non-hydrogenated/dehydrated/powdered/instant, just as there are in Britain. But let us not sneer at what has become traditional, for if the Brits were to look to their own larders and recipe books, we have our fair share of oddities. Who am I to cast aspersions when I live in a country that regards Bisto as the smell of childhood, and where stock is Oxo and stuffing is Paxo for a great majority? Let us not sneer either at what those few people, who landed on the shores of Massachusetts in 1621, have achieved and have given the world. People throng to shout the American nation down, particularly in the UK. It is easy to do, and it’s the acceptable face of racism and xenophobia, but it shouldn’t be. Every nation has it's dark side. But every nation has something to be proud of too, and that’s what giving thanks is about. Without America, the world would be a much poorer place culturally and gastronomically if nothing else, and if we want to get pedantic about it, it’s all down to a few Europeans anyway! So I for one raised a metaphorical glass of egg-nog (Borden, natch) on Thursday to the great nation, and gave thanks to Aunt Jemima, Libby’s, Campbell’s and Keebler for their unique role in a nations gastronomic history.
But maybe not to Jell-O.