Jell-O and the Kewpies. New York: American Lithographic Co., 1915.
When I was twelve years old, we moved from a semi-suburban, overwhelmingly Mormon neighborhood to a neighborhood full of hippies. My Jell-O consumption, already shaken by the disappearance of my beloved Jell-O 1-2-3, took a nosedive. Gone were the block parties and playdates with their lime Jell-O jigglers and pistachio puddings; my mother started buying fruit leather and hummus from the local food co-op instead. Over the last few years, in my own mildly reactionary way, I have found my way back to Jell-O. I now own at least three Jell-O cookbooks and a variety of molds. I even had myself convinced at one point that Bavarian Creams (Jell-O style, of course) were just the thing for summer entertaining.
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Helps for the Hostess. Camden, NJ: Joseph Campbell Company, 1916.
I was going to begin this post by triumphantly declaring that I didn’t own a single can of Campbell’s soup. But when I went to the kitchen to double-check, I found (of course) a can of cream of mushroom. I have no idea where it came from, but there it was. My mother, raised in California in the 1950s and thus perversely fond of canned soups, would be proud. Some quick back-of-the-envelope math leads me to believe that I ate chicken breasts with cream of mushroom soup approximately three hundred times between the years of 1978 and 1996; green bean casserole (canned green beans, water chestnuts, cream of mushroom soup, Durkee French-fried onions) probably accounts for another hundred and fifty or two hundred exposures. My Campbell’s soup consumption, aside from the occasional can of chicken noodle when I was under the weather, was mostly in the form of these casseroles. I was not alone. John Thorne, in his wonderful Mouth Wide Open, points out that “purchasers us[e] one of every three cans as a recipe ingredient; with cream of mushroom soup, that figure jumps to 80 percent.”
Until 1916, when Campbell’s published Helps for the Hostess, canned soups were primarily marketed as, well, soups. Perhaps realizing that the demand for clam bouillon and mutton soup had its limits, Campbell’s devised new recipes. For the first time, the soups were used as recipe ingredients, rather than as stand-alone courses. Helps for the Hostess starts off with menus featuring Campbell’s soup, but eventually moves on to aspic, pointing out that with Campbell’s consommé and bouillon ”you [could] have a crystal-clear aspic without any labor.” No more “trouble boiling, straining with egg whites, etc.:”
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