Recipes for Living; Miss Congealiality (Published 2000) (2024)

Several years ago my mother had a four-day house party, during which she served an almost exclusively gelatin-based menu. I don't think it was on purpose; she just wanted to make everything in advance so that she could spend as much time as possible with her friends. But by the end of the second day, when the guests had already consumed a crab-meat mousse, a strawberry mousse, two kinds of tomato aspic and a charlotte russe, one complained that he could not get up from the table. ''I think,'' he said, ''my blood has coagulated.''

None of the rest of us saw anything funny about the food. This was in the Mississippi Delta, after all, where congealed items were a staple of our diets. In ''Gourmet of the Delta,'' a cookbook put together by the region's Episcopal churchwomen, there are 70 salad recipes, and 51 of them contain gelatin; in the ''Memphis Cookbook,'' 23 of the 33 salads are congealed. I didn't even bother to count the desserts. We congeal everything. Instead of serving Smithfield ham with hot mustard, we serve it with hot mustard mousse. Rare roast beef gets horseradish mousse sliced and stacked with the beef on homemade yeast rolls. For hors d'oeuvres, we would rather offer a molded Roquefort ring (Roquefort, chopped pecans, cream and cream cheese) than mere Roquefort. Then there are the endless variations on tomato aspic, including my favorite -- tomato soup aspic, a Junior League-cookbook perennial made with canned tomato soup, mayonnaise, cream cheese and sliced green olives.

I had always assumed that the Southerner's proclivity toward anything made with gelatin derived from the heat. All those smooth and glistening aspics and mousses would have provided cool relief. In fact, it wasn't until the advent of refrigeration that we could enjoy them during most of the year. ''Jelly should never be made in hot weather,'' Marion Cabell Tyree warns in ''Housekeeping in Old Virginia,'' published in 1879. In ''Dishes and Beverages of the Old South,'' published in 1913, Martha McCulloch-Williams describes a typical wedding menu, adding that in cold weather, wine jelly ''took the place of syllabub.''

It turns out that our fondness for jelled foods comes from the British, who began making molded ''jellies'' as early as medieval times, when artistic cooks decorated them with edible gold and silver. Techniques for making them weren't perfected until toward the end of the 18th century, when they became symbols of sophistication and status. No wonder. To make them was such a long and tedious process, only the wealthy could afford it. First, calves' feet and knuckles or hartshorn (deer antlers) were simmered in water for hours and allowed to cool, leaving a translucent jelly on the top. The jelly was further reduced by boiling, clarified with egg whites and flavored with everything from fruit and wine or cream to ground meat or nuts. A typical example is ''The duch*ess of Montague's Receipt to Make Hartshorn Jelly,'' from an 18th-century manuscript found at Canons Ashby in Northamptonshire. In it, the cook is advised to put in ''one Gallon of water half a pound of Hartshorn. Let them boyl slowly till the Liquor is a pretty strong Jelly, then strain it off and put in ... the peel of eight oranges and four lemons, cut very thin, boyl it a quarter of an hour, then put in the whites of 12 eggs ... the Juice of the Oranges and Lemons, and a pound and a quarter of double refined Sugar, boyl it a little and then strain it through a Flannell Bagg.''

In colonial America, gelatin was not such an indicator of class. In her cookbook, Tyree points out that it was easy for ''country housekeepers in particular to make this sort of jelly, as the materials generally are within their reach.'' Isinglass, a jelling agent made from the air bladders of fish, was also popular, and by the 1860's some crude commercial gelatins (sold in paper-thin ''leaves'') were available. Tyree was partial to Cox's Sparkling Gelatin, and included it in recipes for blanc mange, Bavarian cream, charlotte russe, ''meat jelly for boned turkey'' and ''lemon froth.'' However, isinglass required almost as much boiling and straining as calves' feet and hartshorn, and the early leaf gelatin was not always foolproof. Finally, in 1890, the process for making granulated commercial gelatin was perfected by Charles Knox, a fact that made him so rich he bought the famous racehorse Anaconda and gave him the unfortunate new moniker ''Gelatine King.''

While gelatin is defined in ''The New Food Lover's Companion'' as ''pure protein derived from beef and veal bones, cartilage, tendons and other tissue,'' most commercial gelatin today is a byproduct of pigskin. This information must be startling to those vegetarians who ingest commercial ice cream, yogurt, gummy bears and the hundreds of other prepared foods containing gelatin, not to mention the ''gel caps'' that encase an increasing number of over-the-counter medicines. Since I am not a vegetarian, I am grateful for those handy quarter-ounce envelopes of instant gelatin. My friends and I spent much of our teen years drinking dissolved Knox straight out of a glass in an effort to make our hair shiny and our nails strong. (These days there is a product called Knox for Nails.) But my devotion to Knox reached its apex just a few years ago, after I'd apparently lost my mind and tried jelling something the old-fashioned way.