Are you saying this wasn't cooked up by a pure well-meaning heart?

Mayonnaise. Salad. I just…can’t.

Don’t worry, the recipe offers a seafood variant!

These people were obsessed with eating canned food. They thought that they could make it palatable with stuff like slathering it in mayonnaise or suspending it in jello.

Boomers are sociopaths. Years of leaded gas exposure gave them lifelong cognitive decline and propensity towards erratic behavior.

sublimated

Angry women transformed directly into a cloud of fury

The real reason behind all the gelatin salad abominations is that after gelatin was first discovered/isolated, it was very costly to produce, but new technology made it much more affordable.

Isolating gelatin requires long cook times (which require lots of fuel) at ideally fairly low temperatures. Then there needs to be some level of filtration to make it as flavorless as possible, and then dehydration to sheets or a powder.

Finally, to actually make one of these "salads", you need refrigeration.

Production of gelatin was industrialized to make it much cheaper, and refrigerators became normal household appliances. You went from gelatin being only really used in "fine dining" to something you could do at home. In the same era, pineapple went from being a fruit that only the rich could get to something anyone could, so it went through a similar explosion of popularity.

The alternative funny answer is that the company that sold gelatin, Knox, was run by a husband and wife, and all the crazy stuff didn't start until the husband died, so either he was holding her back, or once she lost her husband, she thought everyone else should, too.

8 hour workday of doing fuck all

I'm not going to argue in favor of 50s gender roles, but fuck off c'mon.

As much as I love that, it's likely this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublimation_(psychology)

Sometimes, I don't know how America avoided a collective heart attack before Kennedy was assassinated.

It was mostly Silents/Greatest generations who were doing that kind of cooking. They were only feeding it to Boomers. In fact, Greatest gen should probably get more flak for making Boomers the way they are. They were super horny and literally fucked the Boomers into existence, but didn't know what to do beyond that.

It's how couples communicated in the 50s. If he showed her ass pic to his friends, she put chopped hot dogs in the next aspic.

https://youtu.be/CM5LQuy72kA for a wonderful wonderful overview. And a song!

Grief does weird things to a person. Some mourn their entire lives, some force other people to eat gelatinous creations. So sad.

it was very costly to produce, but new technology made it much more affordable.

Applies to basically anything shortly after WW2.

Yep, Greatest Gen grandparents raised me. Mom made all sorts of jello and casserole abominations. I'd probably be an inch taller if I could have stomached that garbage as a kid.

Yeah, their WWII PTSD really boosted the canned food craze. But the Boomers (no pun intended) ate it up, and carried it along and put it all in plastic.

The first time I had Thanksgiving with my first wife's family, one of the dishes was blackberry jello with green grapes in it. I was never a big jello fan, but I took some of everything to be polite. I put a fork full in my mouth, bit down, and thought "oh no, something is rancid!" The texture was wrong, too. I was just going to spit it into my napkin when I realized it wasn't rancid, but it took a moment for me to place the flavor. It was a green olive.

That should have been a warning that there was something wrong with that family.

I've worked with many many people this decade that got paid more than me to do literally fuck all for the whole shift and got approved for overtime more frequently where they continued to be absolutely useless but they kissed the correct asses and sucked the right toes.

I can't hear the word "aspic" without thinking of Don't Hug Me I'm Scared.

How much have you had today? Too much makes your teeth go grey!