Welcome to the Food, Glorious Food blog series. This new, limited series is a companion blog series to the Museum’s temporary exhibition of the same name, now on display in the Museum’s lobby and Burgoyne Room through autumn 2025.
Throughout the series, Curator Kathleen Powell and Public Programmer Abbey Stansfield (both the expert bakers here at the Museum), will be exploring Victorian-era recipes and local food history to help us all appreciate the importance of food and its history in our daily lives.
In this edition of Food, Glorious Food, we discover the strange world of Jell-o in the 1920s with a post written by our curator Kathleen Powell.
Bon Appetit!
Pink Velvet
Publisher: Group Four of the Women’s Association of the Welland Avenue United Church
From: Food Lore from Group Four
Easy, economical, not too rich for children and fancy enough for company.
Canada in the 1920’s was a time of change but also a time where the country was looking to “get back to normal” after the trauma of the First World War.
The 1921 Canadian census gives us an idea of what the country looked like in the second decade of the 20th century. The population of Canada in 1921 was 8,775,853. Of that, 26,669 lived in what is now the geographical area of St. Catharines (St. Catharines, Merritton, Port Dalhousie, and Louth Township).**
There were 5,204 families living in the city of which 2,898 owned their homes and 2,306 rented. The average monthly rent in Ontario in 1921 varied between $20 to $40 per month for the majority of renters. St. Catharines had a 98% literacy rate and 95% of the children of the city were in school. The average family had 1.55 children
To purchase a house in St. Catharines in 1920, according to the St. Catharines Standard, would set you back somewhere between $2000 for a new 4 room frame cottage with clothes closets, and water and electrical fixtures in the north end of the City; to $4500 for a two storey frame dwelling on Raymond Street with 11 rooms.
The average monthly earnings for a head of household for the closest community to St. Catharines as reported in the 1921 census is $202.45 in Hamilton for a yearly average of approximately $2500. (the census only reported average earnings for the largest cities in each province)
According to the 1921 Vernon’s City Directory the city was home to 18 restaurants of all types, 11 Ice cream parlours, 12 bakers and confectioners and 16 confectioners. Added to this were 100 grocers. All in the business of providing sustenance to the citizens of St. Catharines.
In the 1920’s, a large part of the city’s social life revolved around places of worship and clubs and groups associated with those institutions. In 1921, there were 23 places of worship in the city, and they invariably supported women’s groups, musical societies, worship study groups, social justice associations, and youth groups, among many others.
At least half of the cookbooks in the Museum’s collection are compilations pulled together by one of the city’s churches through their women’s auxiliary or social group. The cookbook featured in this blog post comes from Group Four of the Women’s Association of the Welland Avenue United Church. Group Four was a social circle of the Welland Avenue United Church – it later amalgamated with other churches to form Silver Spire United Church on St. Paul Street in St. Catharines. Welland Avenue and Silver Spire have a long history, which you can watch on our History from Here series.
We don’t know anything about Group Four but we can guess that it was a social group of women of the congregation who met regularly for fellowship and in support of the Church’s community initiatives. In the 1920’s Group Four pulled together this cookbook – Food Lore from Group Four.
The cookbook includes mostly desserts but also a couple of savoury dishes and sauces.
For this blog post, I have decided to prepare the Pink Velvet Dessert submitted to the cookbook by Renie Midgley. This recipe is essentially a cold dessert of whipped milk and Jell-o with a graham crumb base. Personally, I typically associate Jell-o desserts with 1950’s and 1960’s entertaining so I was surprised to see a recipe with Jell-o as early as the 1920’s. So, of course I did some research to find out the history of this very common household product.
Gelatin in foods and desserts is certainly not a 20th century invention. The use of gelatin in cooking goes back to the 15th century. Gelatin is a protein that is produced by boiling animal bones and connective tissue in order to extract their collagen. This was an incredibly time-consuming process and usually only used by households with servants who could spend hours creating these elaborate jellied desserts and dishes. The Victorians were especially enamoured of jellied entrees and desserts and elaborate moulds were created as vessels for these fancy dishes that would oftentimes be the centre of the table.
Jell-o however was invented in 1897 in Leroy, New York, where cough syrup manufacturer Pearle Bixby Wait and his wife Mary developed this product made of powdered gelatin, fruit flavouring, and sugar and trademarked the name Jell-o. the success of Jell-o was not a given and Wait was forced to sell the patent soon after to Francis Woodward, owner of the Genesee Pure Food Company.
The eventual success of Jell-o as a product was a result of a few factors that came together all at the same time – access to refrigeration in the home, the invention of powdered gelatin, industrial packaging, and modern marketing techniques, of which Jell-o was at the forefront. The Genesee Pure Food Company used the innovative marketing technique of distributing recipe books along with their products to make it easier to see how the product could be used in home kitchens.
Another interesting fact I found out about Jell-o was a local connection. The first Canadian manufacturer of Jell-o was located in Bridgeburg, Ontario (Fort Erie). They also distributed recipe books to Canadian households with new and easy ways to use their products.
The Recipe
This recipe for Pink Velvet dessert was very easy to pull together:
Pink Velvet
Ingredients
- 16 graham wafers (rolled fine)
- 4 tbs. butter (melted)
- 1 pkg. raspberry Jello
- 1/2 cup hot water
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 1 tsp. lemon juice
- 1 large can Carnation milk (well chilled)
Method
Butter and graham crumbs were mixed together to make the crust.
1 – “Mix butter and graham wafer crumbs. Put half in bottom of lightly greased pan.”
The crust is just a mixture of graham crumbs and butter. I was skeptical of the lack of sugar in the crust but pressed on anyway. A quick search of the internet let me know that seven graham crackers is equal to one cup of crumbs so I doubled that to two cups and to that added a quarter cup of butter, melted. A quick mix then then half the mixture was pressed into the bottom of a buttered backing dish and placed in the fridge to cool and set.
2 – “Dissolve sugar and Jello in the hot water. Add 1tsp. or more of lemon juice.”
One package of raspberry Jell-o, one quarter cup of sugar and one teaspoon of lemon juice were added to one cup of boiling water and stirred until dissolved. This was set aside to cool.
Raspberry Jell-o, sugar and lemon juice were added to boiling water and set aside to cool.
3 – “Let stand while you whip the canned milk. When milk is thick add the Jello mixture and continue beating until it peaks.”
In the meantime, a chilled can of Carnation evaporated milk was beaten until “thick”. The Jell-o liquid was added to the whipped milk and then the mixture was beaten until it reached soft peaks. This took longer than expected and really didn’t reach the consistency of even soft peaks.
Chilled evaporated milk was whipped and the Jell-o mixture added and whipped some more!
4 – “Pour over the crumbs in the pan and cover with remaining crumbs. Place in the refrigerator until ready to serve.”
This whipped mixture was spread onto the graham crumb crust and the remaining crust was sprinkled on top and it was all placed in the fridge to set up and cool.
The final mix was spread onto the crust and chilled until set.
According to the recipe’s author this recipe is “easy, economical, not too rich for children and fancy enough for company.” It was surprisingly light and not too sweet and the pink colour was certainly fancy!
The final product really looks like a pink velvet dessert.
** While not all of Louth Township became part of St. Catharines, for the purpose of this post, I have included the compiled number as the census does not break down the population any further.
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