Strawberry Jell-O
“Did you write a blog about it?” Well, uh, no.
“Well at least you got some photos didn’t you?!?” Um, well, not really…
Lisa was quizzing me about my three week visit to Republic in the remote Upper Peninsula of northern Michigan. I had been telling her about the strawberry Jell-O we made and her journalistic instincts got the better of her. “That’s so cool,” she told me.
On my insistence, several of us had gone to pick strawberries. The U.P. is almost entirely rural, and u-pick strawberries, raspberries and blueberries are common. (Not to mention the miles and miles of wild berries that grow along the roads and railway embankments.) The weather had been unseasonably cool and wet and the ripe strawberries were rotting fast on the plants. I checked each berry carefully as it went into the lug, eating on the spot the ones that were too perfectly ripe. On the way home the car filled with a delicate perfume.
The next afternoon we made jam—strawberries, sure-gel and sugar. The recipe insisted on 6 cups of sugar for 2 cups of fruit. We reversed the ratio and got a delicious conserve but an unsure gel. That didn’t stop us from putting it on everything.
The next project was Jell-O. Jell-O is ubiquitous in the Midwest, central to regional identity. “Salad” in local parlance refers to Jell-O with carrots or fruit in it. In our attempt to go native and fit in, Joe and I were making homemade Jell-O with plain gelatin and fresh fruit. We raided the local St. Vincent de Paul for authentic Jell-O molds and scoured vintage copies of “The Joys of Jell-O” for inspiration. In the rugged backwoods of northern Michigan we were pioneering a Jell-O renaissance!
A half gallon of strawberries were cored, cut and sugared to release their juices. The gelatin was melted in hot water and stirred in. Spoonfuls of homemade jam were added to intensify the flavor and the whole thing poured into a mold. Brilliant! The essence of strawberries captured in a perfect mid-summer form.
We went on to experiment with uncooked strawberry pies (pastry cream in a baked pie shell buried in strawberries with a little gelatin), strawberry parfait (homemade strawberry Jell-O unmolded onto a basin of fresh tapioca pudding), and strawberry dessert (Joe made a sponge cake, cut it up and stirred it into homemade Jell-O and served it with whipped cream).
And there were still plenty of strawberries left over to put on cereal in the morning. The day before our visit ended, the wild blueberries and raspberries came ripe. And the chokecherries and pin cherries were on the horizon. If we’d had another month there we could have transformed the world of Jell-O forever.
