According to food historians, for the two decades or so after the end of World War II, newspaper food sections were often overlooked as nothing more than a collection of casserole recipes and plugs for local grocery stores and other advertisers. In David Kamp’s popular book, The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation, women’s pages are largely dismissed – relegated to only a few mentions. In one reference, he mockingly refers to them as the “Jello-abusing women’s-page ladies” (p 10). It was this lumping in of food and women’s editors with Jello recipes that led me to look at Jello advertising. (In the post-World War II years though the 1950s, food sections ran up to 48 pages – made thick with food ads for local grocers and national companies like Jello and Campbell’s.)
The colorful appeal of Jello gelatin, and its pudding products – introduced in 1936, made it perfect for magazine and newspaper ads. The above image was typical with lots of color and the beginnings of food styling. Many ads featured recipes in the hopes that the page would be kept by middle-class homemakers. These old images are still popular online.
The above 1948 advertisement – likely from a women’s magazine – features three recipes and images demonstrating the visual appeal of the pudding dessert. (The concept of food needing a visual appeal goes back to the 1940s as newspaper photo departments began creating attractive – for the time – images. This was done at the Milwaukee Journal and the Chicago Tribune, among others.) The pudding recipes in this ad included several additional ingredients. The butterscotch pudding is featured on between of a quartered banana with whipped cream and a cherry on top. The chocolate pudding includes strange-looking piles of whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles. The vanilla pudding is transformed into a parfait in a glass dessert cup and topped with raspberries.
This was concept of taking an easy-to-make product and making it more complex with new ingredients and display was typical for the time. As the story goes, homemakers balanced the ease of convenience foods and the role of caring for the family by making sure the dessert was not too easy. (Another example would be baking a cake with cake mix and then decorating the cake in a sophisticated way to indicate love of her family.) In other words, this ad shows homemakers that this product is both easy to use, as a convenience food, but that it can also be “dressed up” to show what a thoughtful wife and mother she was for her family.
When writers like David Kamp mock women's page editors for their Jello recipes, the above is an example. The odd look aside (No one noticed that it looks like eyes?), some writers have noted that the technicolor television times of the late 1950s and the 1960s influenced the bright colors of Jello in its print ads.
