June 1, 2017 • 47 mins
America loves to go nuts over new food trends and it turns out that the 20th century was a boon time for them.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house stuff Works
dot com. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark
with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Jerry, Jerome Rolling, and Frank
the Chair. Oh Frank, he's been here the whole time.
(00:23):
He just keeps quiet mostly mostly. Yeah. I don't have
my hat on today though, so I know what gives
I don't know. You know, I'm growing the hair out,
so I thought i'd just let it flow. I noticed
it looks good. Why are you growing it out? I
don't know. It just sort of started happening. Then I
was like, my brother's got good hair, is longer. Yeah,
(00:45):
I'm always trying to be more like him. Plus I
can't have a butt cut with short hair. Yeah. Plus
I mean I've had the same short, spiky hair for
like fifteen years. Time to mix it up, I know, man.
When I started growing my note, I was like, what
am I doing? What's with this? Cube? All? Crap? I'm
so tired of all this. Let me just see what
(01:05):
what it looks like, you know, with a what's that
quarterback's name? Joe Eisman No, no, Terry Bradshaw, No, you
know the one Randall Cunningham. No, tom Brady, tom Brady,
despite your harassment, I still figured it out. What about
(01:26):
tom Brady? He want his hair? I have his hair, buddy,
I don't know about that. I do me and tom Brady? Now,
uh chuck. Yes, did you grow up on TV dinners
at all? No? Really no. My mom is was and
is a great cook, so she wouldn't have that. I see,
(01:48):
I see. Wow, Well I did. I grew up on
TV dinners, and usually when a TV dinner appeared, Seriously,
you did miss out. They were pretty amazing when you're
like six, seven years old. I've had them when you
were six or seven. No, I had them like in college. Okay,
so so okay, so you understand the magic of a
(02:09):
TV dinner, right, sure? Alright? Imagine that as like a
six year old. It was magical. All of your foods
in like a different little compartment, Brownie just staring at you,
waiting like just just wait, just wait, buddy. Um when
you're six, it's just even better. And when I was six,
if I would get a TV dinner, it meant that
my parents were like going to do something right, they
(02:31):
were going to play bridge or something like that. So
it was like a special night, like I probably exactly,
I'd probably get to stay up late, or there'd be
some babysitter or whatever. Um, it was always just kind
of a special thing when TV dinners made an appearance.
My parents never did anything together. They never like, they
(02:53):
never played cards or no. Man, I rarely had babysitters.
I really I don't remember having baby sitters. There was
always one of them there. Yeah, maybe they didn't trust you,
they didn't like each other. They may have really enjoyed
key parties well plus yeah you never know, Um I
(03:15):
had Uh. I have a sister that's six years older though,
so Yeah. But they still didn't do a lot of
I think I remember. I can literally just think of
a few times. They like went to an Olivia Newton
John concert once. Uh, they've got a pretty good track
record so far, and my mom went and saw Elvis,
but not with my dad. Wow. On that last tour
(03:39):
two man, the uh, I think they call that the
jumpsuit Integrity Tour. They hold on, let me catch my breath. Yeah,
they didn't put an undignified ending. Yeah they didn't. They
didn't do much stuff together, so I didn't get a
lot of TV dinners. I didn't get a lot of Hey,
(04:00):
there's just throw it in and warm it up. My
mom was kind of yeah, always cooking for us. Yeah, yeah, no,
my mom cooked a lot too. But now that I'm
older and look back, I'm like us pretty convenient meal.
Like you know, she was an e R nurse for
PiZZ sake, weird hours and stuff. Um, but she was
a great mom. She raised me very well, as everybody knows.
(04:22):
It's a well known fact. So with TV dinners in particular, though,
I have a certain amount of nostalgia forum, but apparently
like America as a whole has a bit of nostalgia
for TV dinners. There's a TV dinner in the Smithsonian,
for peze sake, and that's like America's greatest repository of
nostalgia for you know. Yeah, So I think we should
(04:45):
take people on a delightful tour of the history of
this wonder of TV dinners. You sound like you're I'm
not so sure. No, no, no, I am sure. I
was just joking around, trying to set it up as
some you know, magical experien everyone's about to have, But
I feel like that's ingrained in it. So as the
story goes, uh, Swanson ce A Swanson and Sons was
(05:10):
and is a leader in the frozen food industry, and um,
whether or not this is legend, who knows, but it's
a great story. Was that uh one Thanksgiving they had
too much turkey on their hands post Thanksgiving to the
tune of something like two fifty tons of turkey that
(05:31):
they didn't sell they which is so sad, you know,
yeah for those Uh yeah, like we so wanted to
give our life as a meal. Now we're just on
a train. Well, yeah, that's what they did. So the
story goes, they had about they loaded it, they couldn't
store it. They didn't none of room and no freezer
(05:53):
room to store all this turkey. So they put it
on a frozen train or a refriger rated train car
as a polar express it's called in the industry. And
the trick to this thing is is in order for
that train to stay refrigerator, it's gotta keep moving. And
so they basically we're just running this turkey all over
the country to keep it frozen and cold. Right, It's
(06:17):
like that one movie UM set in the future with
Tilda Switten where like the train never stops societies on
the train. Yeah, that's like that, but with frozen turkeys.
That's a good movie. So it's like that cross between
that and Speed. Yes, like so if the train ever stops,
it's gonna lose refrigeration, the losers refrigeration, the turkeys all
(06:40):
go bad. So there's this remember that Simpsons which one
when Homer is trying to describe or think of the
name of the movie Speed. He's like, it's about a
about a bus if it's speed goes down and it
can't speed up. And he says it like that many times,
and he goes, I think it's called the bus that
wouldn't slow down or that couldn't slow down. Yeah, I
(07:02):
remember that one very funny line. Um, but this is
real life, Chuck. This wasn't a cartoon or a joke.
Half a million pounds of turkey on a train and
if if it's topped it would spoil. No, the idea
that this actually happened, it's so insane to me. So
(07:24):
apparently the Swanson brothers Clark and um, what was the
other brothers, Gilbert Gilbert. I wanted to say Clark and Gable,
but Clark from Gilbert Swanson said all right, employees, we
need you to put your heads together and come up
with an idea. So they had, again this is the legend,
they had an employee contest where, um, whoever could come
(07:47):
up with what to do with all this turkey I
guess would just be the employee of the month or
something like that. Um. And all the while this contest
is going on in the Swanson company, there's a training
out there are in the United States of America, just
circling endlessly because it can't stop or else the turkeys
will go bad until this Winton wins. Yeah. Yeah. So
(08:11):
there was a salesman named Jerry Thomas g E r
R Y, not like our own j E R I right,
which no one ever gets. Right, Um, this is the
party I don't get. He traveled from Nebraska to Pittsburgh
to where Pan American Airways had their kitchens because they
(08:33):
were testing uh single compartment uh foil tray meals that
they would serve to people. And I guess he couldn't
envision what that might look like unless he went there
in person, right and steal one. Well yeah, so that yeah,
and it was a single compartment right, So basically it
was just a trade that you put a bunch of
(08:55):
food on. There were like different compartments in the trade,
and he's like, I gotta get my hands on one
of the right. This is innovation. Yeah, I don't understand
that either, which is why his story smells a little
fishy to me. Um. But this, this guy, Jerry Thomas,
is the He's he's known as the inventor basically of
the TV dinner. Right. So he comes back to the
(09:19):
Swanson brothers and says, I got it. I've I've driven
from Pittsburgh back home, uh to wherever the Swanson company
is located? Where am I? He famously said, Um, And
he said, and I've added two more compartments into this trade.
So now it's a three compartment trade. And I through
two lines and then I know what to do with
(09:42):
the turkey. Now we're gonna basically sell it as a
frozen Thanksgiving dinner. And they said your employee of the month, Jerry. Yeah.
They say, look, you got your your potatoes and gravy here,
you get your peas here, you got your turkey here.
None of it touches each other. I'm a genius. I'm
Jerry Thomas. So this coalesced with the another uh craze,
(10:05):
which was television, and in nineteen fifty three there were
thirty three million households with televisions, and um, it was
really I mean, there have been other people that had
been doing this before. Quaker State Foods UH in nineteen
forty nine had something in the supermarket of frozen meal
called under Geez the most the most one of the
(10:30):
I don't want to say the most one of the
most offensive brand names ever. Yeah, the one eyed Eskimo label. Um, yeah,
that's that's terrible. So they were stelling those in supermarkets.
And then in previous to that, even UH the Strato
plates from Maxim were being served on airplanes, but not
(10:51):
as a retail food, so it had been done before.
So the creation of the TV dinner well wait, don't
don't don't leave out Jack Fisher, who Jack? Sure? Oh
all right? What was that one called frigid dinners? Yes,
but they're the most depressing meal ever because they were
served in bars. Yeah, they're serving in a bar, so
you didn't have to leave to go home to eat dinner.
(11:12):
You could just stay and keep drinking. Oh man. There
were some bars in l A and Los Felis when
I lived there that around two am, the Tomali guy
would come around, So okay, that's different. Oh dude. It
was the best. They were legit handmade to Molly's and
at one was the perfect time to be dropping into
(11:32):
the drawing room, you know. Anyway, the creation of the
TV dinner was not so much that it was a
brand new thing, but it was. It was a marketing
success story because the TV they thought, if we can
build a sing around the television, then we've got something
in our hands. That was the key the TV making
(11:54):
it a TV dinner, right, because all of a sudden
it was like, hey, everybody loves TV. Plus, this is
something I didn't realize. It added a certain amount of
like cashe to the TV dinner because if you had
a TV dinner, it meant that you had a TV.
And if you had a TV, you were probably upper
middle class at the time, right, So the idea of
(12:17):
having a TV or a dinner to go with your
TV really appealed to Americans, And even to this day
it was such a great marketing coup. I guess that
um people still call these and like almost any frozen
entree or frozen meal, a TV dinner, even though it
(12:37):
was nineteen six two when Swanson stopped calling their products
that they still made the products, they just stopped calling
them TV dinners. Every everybody else kept calling them TV dinner.
You were eating these in the eighties, like twenty years
after they that brand went away, still calling the TV
dinners and eating them on TV trades. This is another
thing you pissed out on, Chuck did you have? So
(12:59):
that was the whole the whole point of a TV
tray was it was a foldable individual table that you
would open up in front of yourself and eat your
TV dinner on while you're sitting on the couch, so
you could watch TV most efficiently while you were eating dinner.
And now they call that the coffee table. You just
stoop over a little bit, right, or the sink? What
(13:21):
eating over the sink? I don't know what that is.
That's a depressing way to eat. So these are actually
called that was the brand, Swanson's TV brand, frozen Dinner.
And there they're big concept with the box. If you
look it up on on the internet. Was it looked
like it was designed like old television? The box was
it the t The dinner itself was like the screen
(13:43):
on the screen and then it had the little dials
on the bottom left and right corner, and uh, you know,
it look like a little TV. It was ninety eight
cents in n and they sold a ton of them, yeah,
they apparently. Um So again, remember all this came from
a bunch of turkey that was about to spoil. So
Swanson ordered start to an industry. Swanson ordered like five
(14:07):
thousand of them initially to be made, and they hired
a small battalion of of um ladies in aprons and
ice cream scoops and spatchel is to assemble these things, right,
and they just had them go right down the assembly line,
and they sold five thousand just almost immediately. And apparently
(14:27):
in the first year um that they were sold, they
sold like ten million of them. So they came out
with them in nineteen fifty four and by the the
end of the first full year of production, which I
guess would be nineteen fifty five, they'd sold ten million
of them. So they went from initially ordering five thousand
of them to selling ten million of them in a year.
(14:49):
So they it just hit America just right, you know. Well, yeah,
and it was at a time where women were starting
to u kind of re enter the workforce, gave them
time that they could still get that hot meal on
the table, because that was their job back then, right right.
It gave women a really great opportunity to provide a
stark contrast to the your husband's mother. Yeah. Yeah, Apparently
(15:11):
there were a bunch of men who were like, this
isn't good enough. I want my wife to cook from
scratch like my mom. Dr Freud, And if they could
be like my mom in a lot of other ways,
that'd be awesome. Would it killer to wear a hairnet? Yeah?
So apparently it didn't delight all men because they weren't
on board. But would killer to just me up in
(15:32):
a diaper? We should do an episode on that sometime.
That's a thing. Oh, I'll talk you about san Freud,
but on men wearing diapers as adults. Yeah, it's for
like I think it's called diaper play for sex play,
but but it's it's diaper centric. Yeah, we should do
a podcast on that just that. Well, if we can
(15:54):
include it in like maybe a fetish one, how about that?
All right? Okay, Wow, that's a weird turn all of
the time. Really did uh geez, you got anything else
on TV Dinners. That's a good way to end it.
I think, nope. Uh, should we take a break? Yep,
all right, I'm gonna go change my diaper. We'll talk
about gelatin right after this. So, Chuck, you were saying
(16:34):
that um in the last one, that uh, that the
TV dinner hit just right and struck struck America in
part because women were starting to enter the workforce, right,
and that was partially the result of World War Two.
World War two also changed things as far as food
(16:55):
and food consumption and food packaging goes, and that apparently
at the end of World War Two there were a
lot of companies that had gone all in into supplying
the troops food and we're making pretty great money, but
apparently we're basically caught with a large amount of supply
um when the war ended, and they said, well, if
(17:18):
we don't figure out a way to get non wartime America,
the regular American consumer to buy this stuff, we're going
to go out of business. Were over extended, basically, And
so food companies, I guess, individually and on the whole,
taught America to basically eat what had prior to that
(17:40):
point been considered field rations. Like spam if you remember
that podcast that kind of was where that whole movement
was born. Yep, spam, condensed soup, um, dehydrated stuff, freeze
dried stuff. Like all of this came out of basically
an overstock of World War two food supplies that were
intended for troops and we're kind of repackaged and rearranged
(18:02):
to be served to the American consumer. And part of
that also was that same thing that TV Dinner struck,
which which was convenient. You know, like, hey, your your
husband still wants a meal and your your family still
expects you to be the one to to cook for him. Um,
but now you have to work. So what are you
gonna do? Well, we have we have something helpful for you,
(18:24):
and it's called convenience food. And one of the big
convenience foods that came out of the post war era.
But really it started to gather steam before that was gelatine. Yeah,
specifically Jello as the name brand, but uh, gelatine, the
word is from Latin gelatas, meaning jellied froze, and uh
(18:45):
it was first used in Egypt, but it was really
first used in cooking in France, and um, you know
I think most people know this by now, but if
you don't, Um, gelatine is as a protein and it's
uh it's produced from collagen from boiling animal bones, yeah
(19:06):
or hoofs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a it's glutinous basically,
and it can go one of two ways, I think,
depending on what you do with it. You can turn
it into glue or you can turn it into food.
That's never a good start, no, it really you know. Yeah,
And a guy from the I think the seventeenth century
(19:27):
in France, what was his name, Peppin someone Peppin, Dennis
Poppin right, who may or may not be related to
Jacques Pepin. It was great and French. He's also a cook. Um.
He was the first person to mention it in writing,
I believe, uh. And then it just kind of sat
there for a while until the nineteenth century, when I
(19:50):
guess people were aware of gelatine and that you could
use it as a food, but it was extraordinarily gourmet,
like the average person was not making jello at home.
It was very time consuming. You you had to start
from scratch and boil animal bones to start the process
of gelatine. It was the exact opposite of how we
(20:11):
think of gelatine today, which is instantaneous. Yeah. So in
the nineteenth century, um, there there this guy named Peter
Cooper uh figured out a way to turn gelatine into
a powder form, a dehydrated gelatine powder. Um, and it
went absolutely nowhere for fifty years. And I was surprised
(20:33):
to find this out. I knew gelatine was pretty old,
but it's it's interesting how it's just kind of moved
along in these very slow little fits and starts, like
no one would give up on it, which is weird
because it's really disgusting if you think about it. It
should have been given up on. Yeah, and it never was.
It's a very bizarre in vention. It almost makes you
(20:55):
feel like there was some sort of divine hand guiding
gelatine along in its progress. Yeah. So, later on in
eight got named Charles Knox uh kind of revolutionized things
when he found came up with a process that resulted
in a dried sheet of gelatine, and he hired salesman
to go door to door to show women like, hey,
(21:16):
you can add liquid to these sheets, you can make desserts,
you can make aspects, which is a really gross word.
I think it is. It's not it's pretty. It's a
gross thing. It's a savory gelatine. Yeah, which we'll get
to that. But uh. A couple of years later, Rose Knox,
which was that his wife, I guess, yes, published a
(21:37):
book called Dainty Desserts, which is a book of recipes,
and uh, things were kind of moving along a little bit. Um.
Then in there was a cough syrup company in New
York called Pearl H Pearl B wait is that what
it's called? Pearl okay? W W A I T. But
(22:00):
they weren't selling much cough syrups, and he said, all right,
let's get into the food business. And uh, the wife,
whose name was May, said, you know, let me add
some fruit syrups to this stuff. And actually she's the
one who named it jello. She came up with that name.
But they didn't succeed either, and sold that to their neighbor.
(22:20):
Uh Francis is that the whole name, or to Francis Woodward, Yes,
for four hundred and fifty bucks. Uh. This person purchased
the name and name brand Jello, right, and he almost
fell victim to the curse of Jello as well. Right,
he could do nothing with it either. Um. Despite some
early attempts. He apparently tried to sell it to his
(22:43):
supervisor at work for thirty five bucks even though he
paid four hundred and fifty to it for it. So
at some point I guess he decided to give it
another go, and he hired a bunch of traveling salesman
sent them out to fairs, community gatherings, that kind of uff,
and said, teach the people how to make the jello.
(23:05):
And this time it started to stick. Actually, Jello Jello
kind of um hit at just the right time. Finally,
I should say, the world was finally ready for jello.
Part of it had to do with um, refrigeration, Yeah,
for sure, once you know, refrigeration is key for jello,
as we all know, right, And once those technologies were developed,
(23:25):
it kind of uh well it formed literally it all
congealed and figuratively. Uh. And then once advertising started taking over,
like in the mid nineteen thirties, Uh, General Foods UM
had a very famous radio ad from Jack Binny, uh
the j E L l O tag, which really kind
(23:47):
of helped push things along as well. Yeah, and I
noticed that at some point they started dabbling with with
other flavors. I think originally they tried strawberry, raspberry, orange,
and lemon, right um, And then they tried chocolate it
and they they apparently chocolate didn't go over very well,
so they were no. First they just released it as
chocolate jello. That's pretty awful. And then they thought, oh,
(24:10):
maybe we should add milk instead of water, and that's
when they came up with jello pudding, and they re
released chocolate and that that spurred like a whole pudding line,
including something I grew up on, which was butterscotch jello pudding.
Oh yeah, man, that was so good, except you you couldn't.
You had to get the skin off. The skin was
no good, But everything under the skin was great. What's
(24:32):
the skin? It was just like a on top. It
was a very it was the tougher layer on top. Yeah,
but if you just scraped it off, you had some
nice pudding underneath. Emily still loves the the brown, the
chocolate jello pudding. Yeah it's good. Yeah. She'll make a
parfait like you know, a little a little putting, a
(24:54):
little whipped cream, a little pudding, little whipped cream. She
knows how to live she does. It's a special night
they have is about three times a year, and I'm like,
oh boy, it's time. Uh So in the nineteen fifties, uh,
supposedly the jello shot with alcohol was invented by uh,
this really interesting guy named Tom Lair who Um he's
(25:14):
a mathematician and a singer songwriter who I looked into him.
He did song parodies about math and chemistry. I guess
he was like the Jonathan Colton of his day as
far as I can tell. And he was also in
the army and to get around alcohol restrictions. As the
story goes, he claims he invented the jello shot, which
I've never had. Uh what, I've never had a jello shot? Wow,
(25:40):
well you're not missing much of the pretty gross well jello.
I can't stand jello. Well, even if you do, even
if you like or or ambivalent to jello, it's it's
just gross. Does it taste like, yeah, it's tequila jello
or whatever. It's a very obnoxious taste. You're supposed to
use like I think you're a place half of the
water with whatever liquor you're using. Usually people use vodka.
(26:02):
It really just stands out in a in a noxious way.
By the way, Tom Larra I thought that name sounded familiar.
He um, he is pretty great. He wrote this one
um song called the Old Dope Peddler and two Chains Actually, um,
you know the rapper two Chains from Atlanta? Yes you do?
Oh wait was he our guy? Was he the guy
(26:24):
that judged that? No? No? Oh, man, who was that guy?
That was young Jock? Right? No? Two Chains is he's
huge man. Um. He did a song where he sampled
the Old Dope Peddler and he, I guess wrote to
Tom Laird to ask for permission to sample, and Tom
Lair had this awesome famous response. So just read up
(26:46):
on that. What was did he let him use it? Yes?
Oh great. So he's the opposite of Don Henley and
probably every single way yeah yeah, uh but jello shots,
jello shots are gross. So jello is speeding along. It's uh,
it's taking over America. Um. And then they decided to
(27:08):
come out with these savory lines and it became uh
and this was this post World War two thing that
you were talking about when um, I guess they did what.
There was this great article you sent Making and Eating
the nineteen fifties most nauseating jello soaked recipes. Yeah, Hunter
Hunter Oatman Stanford and uh, they did this interview and
(27:31):
um with Ruth Clark. Yeah, Ruth Clark. Basically it's a
really good interview and she talks about kind of this
savory movement that took over, and not only with Jello,
but the fact that it was a time in America
where and if you look back, it's so great to
look back at these old ads and these old recipe
books that it was a time where you would the
(27:55):
goal was to have a dinner party with this big, flashy, uh,
experimental and unique centerpiece food centerpiece made of jello. Well,
all kinds of things. We're talking about the hot dog
tree right yeah, there and there there. It could be
a lot of different stuff, And I think that's what
Ruth Clark does. She recreates this stuff right, and her
(28:17):
poor husband has to eat it. Um. But a lot
of those things were Jello molds. And a lot of
the reason why jello molds were so weird and so
popular is because Jello put so much time and effort
into publishing cookbooks. And the whole point was all of
these food companies wanted, like all of their products to
(28:38):
to be your entire meal. So they were putting these
these random parts like products that the food company made
into some really weird configurations, and they came up with
some very odd jello molds in the fifties or sixties.
Such a sad culinary time it was. But the Ruth
Clark makes a good point that that to the people
(28:59):
at that time, like a really well thought out, fancy
jello mold was as a centerpiece of your table was
like the pinnacle of classiness. Yeah, but we're talking about
like a shaped mold with like uh lamb shank and
asparagus inside of jello. A savory jello that's like celery flavored.
(29:23):
You're lucky if it was savory. The lime jello was
one of the most abused jello flavors of all time.
People would put tuna and stuff in with the lime jello.
There's one called Perfection salad that's cold slaw inside of
lime jello. And what Ruth Clark pointed out was that
gelatin apparently preserves food really well, and and that cole
(29:47):
slaw that would have otherwise been inedible and running after
day three was still like crunchy after day five. When
it was put inside of a jello mold. Still gross. Yeah.
There's actually a great BuzzFeed article, um if you want
to get an idea of what people were doing in
the fifties, sixties, and seventies with jello molds. It's called
seventeen Horrifying, lee disgusting retro Gelatin recipes and they are gross.
(30:11):
Man like cottage cheese and salmon mold. Yeah, yeah, I
mean I hate jello oh man, like you're waking nightmare.
I didn't even look through it. You sent it to
me and that scrolled about halfway through and just deleted
through my computer out the window. The best one I
see is lime cheese salad. It's it's lime jello mixed
with cottage cheese and then into the center of the
(30:34):
jello mold you put a seafood salad. Oh my god,
sour kraut mold. It just goes on and on. But
it was a weird time and again. Ruth Clark has
a bunch of theories. She said she can't really answer
exactly why jello molds were as big as they are,
but she posits that, uh, part of it was this
idea that there were all these companies trying to get
(30:56):
you to use their products. And these were just monstos
cities that they came up with, and people fell for it.
Uh like can salmon, can tuna in jell o? Right,
Oh my god, so that's jello olds Man. Uh, where
do you want to head next? Let's go to the
crock pot. All right, do a little that was a
(31:23):
crock pot travel. So first of all, I have a
croc pot the same here, and um, it's yours. Actually
croc Pot are using it as a proprietary eponym. I
don't think it is a croc Pot brand pot. Yeah,
it's a slow cooker, um, and I'd forget to use
it a lot, but when I remember, I'll go in
(31:45):
a little crock pot binge where I'll cook, you know,
a few meals over the course of a few weeks
in a croc pot and they're still great if you
know how to how to use it and how to
spice things up for sure. You know. Apparently at first
people didn't know because if you're cooking a recipe, say, um,
it's like simmering, say like a beef stew on the stovetop,
(32:11):
that simmering action that it's going undergoing it does something
different to the recipe than a croc pot does, even
though it's the exact same recipe. Um. And so at
first when croc pots came out, it was first introduced
by rival. Back in when croc pots first came out, um,
they people were like, this is this this dinner that
(32:35):
it's making is really gross. It doesn't taste very good.
It's bland, and yet they still didn't stop using or
buying croc pots. Well, food was more bland back then.
Well we're talking the seventies, so by the seventies, I
think it was the people were using more spices than before.
I think it was more bland, and like the forties
and maybe the fifties. Yeah, but that one, yeah, you're
(32:57):
probably right, But that one article we read said, you know,
like an old recipe for chili would have like a
teaspoon of chili powder or something, and it's like all
the food just sucked because they didn't realize like, no, man,
you dump a bunch of that junk in there. So well,
you were saying back in the forties or fifties, when
TV dinners really hit, moms were starting to enter the
(33:18):
work force. In nine moms were really into the workforce.
And so the idea of having a crock pot where
you could make this meal in a one pot in
the morning, throw it all in there, turn it on,
and then come home at the end of the day
and dinner was ready and you still went to work
and got everything you needed to get done done was
(33:38):
so attractive that just that despite the fact that it
made these meals that did not taste like they should, um,
people were still, like I said, they were still buying
the crock pots and instead they started to look around
to find tips for how to make these things taste better.
And actually a woman named what was her name, Mabel, Yeah,
(33:59):
Mabel Hoffman, Mabel Hoffman, stepped into the fray and said,
piece piece, children, I've got this covered. Listen up. Yeah.
She wrote a book called The Crockery Cookery or Crockery
Cookery No the and uh it was a huge, huge hit,
was the New York Times bestseller. I believe she went
(34:19):
on to sell about six million copies of this thing.
And um, I don't even think we've said that, you know,
we said we you throw the food in there and
cook it all day. But the whole idea is that
you put a kind of a tight fitting lid on
there and it and it cooks at a very very
low heat all day long. Right, and then when you
when you get home from work eight hours later or
(34:41):
something like that, it will it will be done, and
you just serve and smile. Yeah, And thanks to Crockery Cookery, UM,
the crock pot uh in nineteen seventy one or two
million bucks and seventy two, ten million, seventy three, twenty
three million, and then eventually peeking in nineteen seventy five
at nine three million dollar urs worth of croc pots
(35:02):
being sold. It was a genuine, legit craze, food craze
and supposedly crock pot cookery. The book was UM America's
sixth best selling cookbook ever. Right, so this was like
a legitimate craze. Crock Pot cooking was a legitimate craze.
But again there was something compared to the same recipes
on the stovetop as compared to a croc pot. Um,
(35:24):
there was something. It was the flavor was just disappointing.
So what Mabel Hoffman did was on a very tight
deadline UM create from scratch a book, I guess, the
world's first cookbook of slow cooker recipes, and she did
it in her own kitchen with like twenty croc pots
going all day every day. She had to testing all
(35:45):
this stuff, and she figured out some of the keys
to crock pot cooking, which was, like, you want to
use way less liquid um thing you would use like
on the stovetop, because you have a lot less um evaporation.
The crock pot keeps sit in there, which is one
reason why meat is so so tender, and a croc
pot or slow cooker um because it just recirculates the
(36:09):
the moisture rather than allowing it to just evaporate. Right.
And then another thing she came up with was that
when you um, when you use herbs into the recipe,
you want to reserve some of them for right before
the things finished cooking, so you can add it like
a pop of fresh flavor. Yes. So once she figured
this out, crock pots just took off even more. Yeah,
(36:31):
so she was they were selling a bunch of crock pots,
she was selling a bunch of cookbooks. Uh. And eventually
she would said, hey, I really was onto something here.
So she wrote Deep Prye Cookery, Chocolate Cookery. Uh, and
these are seventy nine, um, seventy seven, like kind of
all in a row crape cookery and then eventually uh healthy,
(36:53):
healthy crockery cookery and um. The person you who interviewed
her later in life said that she was just this
really great lady, very humble, and was super upfront about
the fact that she like, hey, I hit something at
the right time with the right book, and it just
(37:13):
sort of I kind of fell into this and it's
been just like a wonderful thing for my life. Yeah,
it's really neat. Yeah, she sounds like a pretty cool person.
So what's your what's your crock pot recipe? Oh? Jeez,
I don't know it's your favorite thing to cook, but
usually some sort of like beef. Yeah, it just does
such a such a good job, like making a roast
or something, you know. Um, but yeah, I that's usually
(37:38):
what I'm cooking when I cook in a crock pot.
Is is beef? All right? Josh's croc pot beef croc
pot surprise right with aspect? Uh, you want to take
a break, Yeah, let's take a break and we'll finish
up with a bit interesting bit on oat brand so chuck. Yes,
(38:16):
we finally arrived We're just gonna go forward a few
years Blue the way Back Machine is in the shop.
This is why I'm having to do it to the
eighties man an oat Brand. Yes, I know that we
differ on the interestingness of this one. I'm just fascinated
(38:36):
by it. I really am, man, because it's got it all.
It's like, um, it's got the eighties. Um. Do you
remember that snl the famous snl um add colon for
colon blow that was based on this came out of
this this trend. Um has to do with studies, studies
(38:56):
that contradict those studies. Um, bad science reporting the whole thing.
I love it, oats oh brand. It's very important. So
there was this huge trend in the eighties where anything
that had to do with oprand you could sell a
million units of a minute. Yes, um. So much so
(39:19):
that there was a article from Tulsa World that UM
said that there were no I'm sorry, the l A
Times article from said that they were over like three
different items available in grocery stores at the time that
touted on its label the fact that it had oprand
and people were nuts for it. Yes they were. And
(39:40):
this is uh largely due to some studies that came
out that said that brand was kind of a miracle
food for lowering cholesterol, right, And that was like back
in the late seventies, and and I guess Quaker Oats
took notice of those studies and they released a thing
called Mother's opran but they sent it straight to the
(40:00):
hippies at the health food store and just and didn't
do anything about They just released a product and that
was that. And then Kellogg's came along and said, hey,
you know what, what if we start telling people that
are food can basically prevent cancer? Can we do that?
And the lawyers said no, And the president of Kelloggs said, well,
we're doing it anyway. Who's gonna stop us, Reagan? And
(40:24):
Reagan said no, I'm not gonna stop you, Reagan, thank you.
And so they said, um, okay, well you eat our
cereal and it will reduce cancer. And nothing happened. There
was no blowback, despite the fact that this has been
illegal for nearly a century. And then Quaker Oats partnered
with Chicago's Northwestern University and Linda Van horn In because
(40:47):
they had a similar study about brand cutting cholesterol. Right,
so they're starting to say, well, Kelleg didn't get in trouble.
Let's try this ourselves. And they went out and they
hired Wilfred Brimley. Remember his ads. Yeah, I think I
told the story about working with him. Oh yeah, it
wasn't he like the antithesis of what his his persona was. Yeah,
(41:09):
the word got around they were like this, you know,
just maybe a short day, because that's how it goes
with him sometimes it's so funny. And I think it was.
I think we wrapped it about half day because he
was just like, I'm done, I'm cantankerous. But in the meantime,
when the cameras were rolling, he he told everybody that
eating quicker opra and was the right thing to do
and it would cut your cholesterol, that's right. And then
(41:30):
this book came out, So things are starting to build
here for opra. And this book came out called The
Eight Week Cholesterol Cure by a guy named Robert E. Kowalski,
and it chronicled his the decline of his l d L,
the bad cholesterol um just from eating an opra and diet.
And that book became extraordinarily popular, supposedly was the the
(41:53):
one of the greatest selling self help health books of
all time. It just took off. Yeah, and then yet
another thing happened, and this was the thing. This is
like where the peak began the UM. I think the
Journal of the American Medical Association April published a study
(42:14):
from the University of Maryland where these researchers found that, yeah,
eating oprand could really significantly lower your cholesterol, and not
only that, it does it for a six of the
price of the expensive cholesterol lowering drugs. That's right, and
people ate even more oat brand That's right. The trend
(42:35):
is developing, can you see it. I think it's fully
developed at this point. So everybody's going opran crazy. And
one of the big things that UM that they were
doing was eating Oprand muffins. But these opra and muffins
were like loaded with fat and butter and eggs, and
so they weren't actually doing anything to lower their cholesterol
(42:55):
because the effects would be counteracted, right, But in the
in the meantime, people were still having fun eating lots
of muffins and pretending they were really healthy. And then
this Harvard study came out and it basically said, you
know what, UM, you're all fools, You're dummies. You know
how it lowers your cholesterol because it keeps you from
eating bacon and eggs. That's how you chumps. Well yeah,
(43:18):
and then that study itself was attacked because they only
studied twenty people, um, which is not much of a study.
It isn't and the people who were on the Opran
diet were eating more fat than the control group. It
was a terrible study, almost like they wanted to take
Oprand down a peg and it worked really well. It's
(43:38):
basically the um science. Reporting in major newspapers and the
news services reported that Oprand was the greatest thing ever,
and then they suddenly turned on it and said Opran
is nothing, and everybody dropped Opran and the if if
you read the stuff today, it's true Oprand really does
lower cholesterol. Um, but he just got overhyped because of
(44:03):
the eighties. That's the eighties for you. That's food fads. Man,
You got anything else? I got nothing else? All right? Man? Well,
if you want to know more about food fans, you
can type those words into the search part how stuff
works dot com search bar. You're not gonna get much, though,
so you may want to just look elsewhere. But still, uh,
(44:24):
since I said that it's time for a listener mail.
I'm gonna call this m S response, and I would
like to say that we got many, many, oh great
responses from our MS episode. A lot of warm thoughts
from people about my friend Billy and just uh it
was just really great people with MS, people who had
(44:46):
people in their family. We heard from doctors and nurses,
and that's just ended up being a really good episode.
So we appreciate that feedback. But this is from anonymous listener. Hey,
I've been listening to your show for a couple of
years now. I want to thank you for making my
commute more engaging. Listened to the show on MS AM
I right home and like to commend you for how
(45:06):
well you handle the topic. I was diagnosed a few
years ago at nineteen uh. Luckily my diagnosis was quick
due to the severity of my first relapse, and I
feel like your podcast would have helped me understanding cope
with the diagnosis in a more constructive manner than my
initially trying to self destruct. Since then, I'm continually uh
learning about the latest research in history. I love that
(45:26):
you discussed uh Ledwina and Augustus death Day as a
lot of the time, they don't come up in the
mainstream discourse of MS. Didn't really know any history until
I wrote an undergrad history paper on MS last year
and found reading through bits of death Day's journal to
be the closest I've ever felt with a historical person.
You mentioned that many tend to keep their diagnosis a secret.
(45:49):
I'll admit that with me, it's a need to know basis,
and I rarely openly talk about it outside of family, friends,
in the support system, and my support system, mainly because
of the stigma of the disease and that the assumption
circulating MS tend to negatively alter people's perceptions of myself
as an individual. Have had people approach me when I
start limping thanks to fatigue and a permanently numb foot,
(46:12):
but I'll rush it off and tell them there's nothing
to worry about or it's an old injury. However, I
think with time it's getting easier to talk about thanks
to resources like your podcasts that are well researched and accurate.
I cringe whenever someone tells me there's an easy homeopathic
solution to my ailments, and sometimes I struggle with discussing
MS in an accessible way that doesn't solely rely on
(46:34):
the clinical pathological understanding of it. And I will be
sure in the future to redirect people to this episode.
Thank you so much for sharing. And uh, we said
we keep this anonymous because this person. Yeah, this person said,
you know, that's great that you read it. But uh,
if if they're keeping it quiet for now, we don't
want to you know, broadcast the names. Yeah nice, so
(47:00):
okay anonymous? Yeah, thanks anonymous. Uh. If you want to
get in touch with us, like anonymous did, you can
tweet to us. Yeah, I guess i'd be anonymous. Um,
I'm at josh um Clark and at s Y s
K podcast. You can hang out with Chuck on Facebook
dot com slash Stuff you Should Know or at Charles W.
(47:20):
Chuck Bryant on Facebook. You can send us both an email. Uh.
We promised to be confidential at Stuff podcast, at how
Stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at
our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot
com For more on this and thousands of other topics,
is it how Stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house stuff Works
dot com. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark
with Charles W. Chuck Bryant, Jerry, Jerome Rolling, and Frank
the Chair. Oh Frank, he's been here the whole time.
(00:23):
He just keeps quiet mostly mostly. Yeah. I don't have
my hat on today though, so I know what gives
I don't know. You know, I'm growing the hair out,
so I thought i'd just let it flow. I noticed
it looks good. Why are you growing it out? I
don't know. It just sort of started happening. Then I
was like, my brother's got good hair, is longer. Yeah,
(00:45):
I'm always trying to be more like him. Plus I
can't have a butt cut with short hair. Yeah. Plus
I mean I've had the same short, spiky hair for
like fifteen years. Time to mix it up, I know, man.
When I started growing my note, I was like, what
am I doing? What's with this? Cube? All? Crap? I'm
so tired of all this. Let me just see what
(01:05):
what it looks like, you know, with a what's that
quarterback's name? Joe Eisman No, no, Terry Bradshaw, No, you
know the one Randall Cunningham. No, tom Brady, tom Brady,
despite your harassment, I still figured it out. What about
(01:26):
tom Brady? He want his hair? I have his hair, buddy,
I don't know about that. I do me and tom Brady? Now,
uh chuck. Yes, did you grow up on TV dinners
at all? No? Really no. My mom is was and
is a great cook, so she wouldn't have that. I see,
(01:48):
I see. Wow, Well I did. I grew up on
TV dinners, and usually when a TV dinner appeared, Seriously,
you did miss out. They were pretty amazing when you're
like six, seven years old. I've had them when you
were six or seven. No, I had them like in college. Okay,
so so okay, so you understand the magic of a
(02:09):
TV dinner, right, sure? Alright? Imagine that as like a
six year old. It was magical. All of your foods
in like a different little compartment, Brownie just staring at you,
waiting like just just wait, just wait, buddy. Um when
you're six, it's just even better. And when I was six,
if I would get a TV dinner, it meant that
my parents were like going to do something right, they
(02:31):
were going to play bridge or something like that. So
it was like a special night, like I probably exactly,
I'd probably get to stay up late, or there'd be
some babysitter or whatever. Um, it was always just kind
of a special thing when TV dinners made an appearance.
My parents never did anything together. They never like, they
(02:53):
never played cards or no. Man, I rarely had babysitters.
I really I don't remember having baby sitters. There was
always one of them there. Yeah, maybe they didn't trust you,
they didn't like each other. They may have really enjoyed
key parties well plus yeah you never know, Um I
(03:15):
had Uh. I have a sister that's six years older though,
so Yeah. But they still didn't do a lot of
I think I remember. I can literally just think of
a few times. They like went to an Olivia Newton
John concert once. Uh, they've got a pretty good track
record so far, and my mom went and saw Elvis,
but not with my dad. Wow. On that last tour
(03:39):
two man, the uh, I think they call that the
jumpsuit Integrity Tour. They hold on, let me catch my breath. Yeah,
they didn't put an undignified ending. Yeah they didn't. They
didn't do much stuff together, so I didn't get a
lot of TV dinners. I didn't get a lot of Hey,
(04:00):
there's just throw it in and warm it up. My
mom was kind of yeah, always cooking for us. Yeah, yeah, no,
my mom cooked a lot too. But now that I'm
older and look back, I'm like us pretty convenient meal.
Like you know, she was an e R nurse for
PiZZ sake, weird hours and stuff. Um, but she was
a great mom. She raised me very well, as everybody knows.
(04:22):
It's a well known fact. So with TV dinners in particular, though,
I have a certain amount of nostalgia forum, but apparently
like America as a whole has a bit of nostalgia
for TV dinners. There's a TV dinner in the Smithsonian,
for peze sake, and that's like America's greatest repository of
nostalgia for you know. Yeah, So I think we should
(04:45):
take people on a delightful tour of the history of
this wonder of TV dinners. You sound like you're I'm
not so sure. No, no, no, I am sure. I
was just joking around, trying to set it up as
some you know, magical experien everyone's about to have, But
I feel like that's ingrained in it. So as the
story goes, uh, Swanson ce A Swanson and Sons was
(05:10):
and is a leader in the frozen food industry, and um,
whether or not this is legend, who knows, but it's
a great story. Was that uh one Thanksgiving they had
too much turkey on their hands post Thanksgiving to the
tune of something like two fifty tons of turkey that
(05:31):
they didn't sell they which is so sad, you know,
yeah for those Uh yeah, like we so wanted to
give our life as a meal. Now we're just on
a train. Well, yeah, that's what they did. So the
story goes, they had about they loaded it, they couldn't
store it. They didn't none of room and no freezer
(05:53):
room to store all this turkey. So they put it
on a frozen train or a refriger rated train car
as a polar express it's called in the industry. And
the trick to this thing is is in order for
that train to stay refrigerator, it's gotta keep moving. And
so they basically we're just running this turkey all over
the country to keep it frozen and cold. Right, It's
(06:17):
like that one movie UM set in the future with
Tilda Switten where like the train never stops societies on
the train. Yeah, that's like that, but with frozen turkeys.
That's a good movie. So it's like that cross between
that and Speed. Yes, like so if the train ever stops,
it's gonna lose refrigeration, the losers refrigeration, the turkeys all
(06:40):
go bad. So there's this remember that Simpsons which one
when Homer is trying to describe or think of the
name of the movie Speed. He's like, it's about a
about a bus if it's speed goes down and it
can't speed up. And he says it like that many times,
and he goes, I think it's called the bus that
wouldn't slow down or that couldn't slow down. Yeah, I
(07:02):
remember that one very funny line. Um, but this is
real life, Chuck. This wasn't a cartoon or a joke.
Half a million pounds of turkey on a train and
if if it's topped it would spoil. No, the idea
that this actually happened, it's so insane to me. So
(07:24):
apparently the Swanson brothers Clark and um, what was the
other brothers, Gilbert Gilbert. I wanted to say Clark and Gable,
but Clark from Gilbert Swanson said all right, employees, we
need you to put your heads together and come up
with an idea. So they had, again this is the legend,
they had an employee contest where, um, whoever could come
(07:47):
up with what to do with all this turkey I
guess would just be the employee of the month or
something like that. Um. And all the while this contest
is going on in the Swanson company, there's a training
out there are in the United States of America, just
circling endlessly because it can't stop or else the turkeys
will go bad until this Winton wins. Yeah. Yeah. So
(08:11):
there was a salesman named Jerry Thomas g E r
R Y, not like our own j E R I right,
which no one ever gets. Right, Um, this is the
party I don't get. He traveled from Nebraska to Pittsburgh
to where Pan American Airways had their kitchens because they
(08:33):
were testing uh single compartment uh foil tray meals that
they would serve to people. And I guess he couldn't
envision what that might look like unless he went there
in person, right and steal one. Well yeah, so that yeah,
and it was a single compartment right, So basically it
was just a trade that you put a bunch of
(08:55):
food on. There were like different compartments in the trade,
and he's like, I gotta get my hands on one
of the right. This is innovation. Yeah, I don't understand
that either, which is why his story smells a little
fishy to me. Um. But this, this guy, Jerry Thomas,
is the He's he's known as the inventor basically of
the TV dinner. Right. So he comes back to the
(09:19):
Swanson brothers and says, I got it. I've I've driven
from Pittsburgh back home, uh to wherever the Swanson company
is located? Where am I? He famously said, Um, And
he said, and I've added two more compartments into this trade.
So now it's a three compartment trade. And I through
two lines and then I know what to do with
(09:42):
the turkey. Now we're gonna basically sell it as a
frozen Thanksgiving dinner. And they said your employee of the month, Jerry. Yeah.
They say, look, you got your your potatoes and gravy here,
you get your peas here, you got your turkey here.
None of it touches each other. I'm a genius. I'm
Jerry Thomas. So this coalesced with the another uh craze,
(10:05):
which was television, and in nineteen fifty three there were
thirty three million households with televisions, and um, it was
really I mean, there have been other people that had
been doing this before. Quaker State Foods UH in nineteen
forty nine had something in the supermarket of frozen meal
called under Geez the most the most one of the
(10:30):
I don't want to say the most one of the
most offensive brand names ever. Yeah, the one eyed Eskimo label. Um, yeah,
that's that's terrible. So they were stelling those in supermarkets.
And then in previous to that, even UH the Strato
plates from Maxim were being served on airplanes, but not
(10:51):
as a retail food, so it had been done before.
So the creation of the TV dinner well wait, don't
don't don't leave out Jack Fisher, who Jack? Sure? Oh
all right? What was that one called frigid dinners? Yes,
but they're the most depressing meal ever because they were
served in bars. Yeah, they're serving in a bar, so
you didn't have to leave to go home to eat dinner.
(11:12):
You could just stay and keep drinking. Oh man. There
were some bars in l A and Los Felis when
I lived there that around two am, the Tomali guy
would come around, So okay, that's different. Oh dude. It
was the best. They were legit handmade to Molly's and
at one was the perfect time to be dropping into
(11:32):
the drawing room, you know. Anyway, the creation of the
TV dinner was not so much that it was a
brand new thing, but it was. It was a marketing
success story because the TV they thought, if we can
build a sing around the television, then we've got something
in our hands. That was the key the TV making
(11:54):
it a TV dinner, right, because all of a sudden
it was like, hey, everybody loves TV. Plus, this is
something I didn't realize. It added a certain amount of
like cashe to the TV dinner because if you had
a TV dinner, it meant that you had a TV.
And if you had a TV, you were probably upper
middle class at the time, right, So the idea of
(12:17):
having a TV or a dinner to go with your
TV really appealed to Americans, And even to this day
it was such a great marketing coup. I guess that
um people still call these and like almost any frozen
entree or frozen meal, a TV dinner, even though it
(12:37):
was nineteen six two when Swanson stopped calling their products
that they still made the products, they just stopped calling
them TV dinners. Every everybody else kept calling them TV dinner.
You were eating these in the eighties, like twenty years
after they that brand went away, still calling the TV
dinners and eating them on TV trades. This is another
thing you pissed out on, Chuck did you have? So
(12:59):
that was the whole the whole point of a TV
tray was it was a foldable individual table that you
would open up in front of yourself and eat your
TV dinner on while you're sitting on the couch, so
you could watch TV most efficiently while you were eating dinner.
And now they call that the coffee table. You just
stoop over a little bit, right, or the sink? What
(13:21):
eating over the sink? I don't know what that is.
That's a depressing way to eat. So these are actually
called that was the brand, Swanson's TV brand, frozen Dinner.
And there they're big concept with the box. If you
look it up on on the internet. Was it looked
like it was designed like old television? The box was
it the t The dinner itself was like the screen
(13:43):
on the screen and then it had the little dials
on the bottom left and right corner, and uh, you know,
it look like a little TV. It was ninety eight
cents in n and they sold a ton of them, yeah,
they apparently. Um So again, remember all this came from
a bunch of turkey that was about to spoil. So
Swanson ordered start to an industry. Swanson ordered like five
(14:07):
thousand of them initially to be made, and they hired
a small battalion of of um ladies in aprons and
ice cream scoops and spatchel is to assemble these things, right,
and they just had them go right down the assembly line,
and they sold five thousand just almost immediately. And apparently
(14:27):
in the first year um that they were sold, they
sold like ten million of them. So they came out
with them in nineteen fifty four and by the the
end of the first full year of production, which I
guess would be nineteen fifty five, they'd sold ten million
of them. So they went from initially ordering five thousand
of them to selling ten million of them in a year.
(14:49):
So they it just hit America just right, you know. Well, yeah,
and it was at a time where women were starting
to u kind of re enter the workforce, gave them
time that they could still get that hot meal on
the table, because that was their job back then, right right.
It gave women a really great opportunity to provide a
stark contrast to the your husband's mother. Yeah. Yeah, Apparently
(15:11):
there were a bunch of men who were like, this
isn't good enough. I want my wife to cook from
scratch like my mom. Dr Freud, And if they could
be like my mom in a lot of other ways,
that'd be awesome. Would it killer to wear a hairnet? Yeah?
So apparently it didn't delight all men because they weren't
on board. But would killer to just me up in
(15:32):
a diaper? We should do an episode on that sometime.
That's a thing. Oh, I'll talk you about san Freud,
but on men wearing diapers as adults. Yeah, it's for
like I think it's called diaper play for sex play,
but but it's it's diaper centric. Yeah, we should do
a podcast on that just that. Well, if we can
(15:54):
include it in like maybe a fetish one, how about that?
All right? Okay, Wow, that's a weird turn all of
the time. Really did uh geez, you got anything else
on TV Dinners. That's a good way to end it.
I think, nope. Uh, should we take a break? Yep,
all right, I'm gonna go change my diaper. We'll talk
about gelatin right after this. So, Chuck, you were saying
(16:34):
that um in the last one, that uh, that the
TV dinner hit just right and struck struck America in
part because women were starting to enter the workforce, right,
and that was partially the result of World War Two.
World War two also changed things as far as food
(16:55):
and food consumption and food packaging goes, and that apparently
at the end of World War Two there were a
lot of companies that had gone all in into supplying
the troops food and we're making pretty great money, but
apparently we're basically caught with a large amount of supply
um when the war ended, and they said, well, if
(17:18):
we don't figure out a way to get non wartime America,
the regular American consumer to buy this stuff, we're going
to go out of business. Were over extended, basically, And
so food companies, I guess, individually and on the whole,
taught America to basically eat what had prior to that
(17:40):
point been considered field rations. Like spam if you remember
that podcast that kind of was where that whole movement
was born. Yep, spam, condensed soup, um, dehydrated stuff, freeze
dried stuff. Like all of this came out of basically
an overstock of World War two food supplies that were
intended for troops and we're kind of repackaged and rearranged
(18:02):
to be served to the American consumer. And part of
that also was that same thing that TV Dinner struck,
which which was convenient. You know, like, hey, your your
husband still wants a meal and your your family still
expects you to be the one to to cook for him. Um,
but now you have to work. So what are you
gonna do? Well, we have we have something helpful for you,
(18:24):
and it's called convenience food. And one of the big
convenience foods that came out of the post war era.
But really it started to gather steam before that was gelatine. Yeah,
specifically Jello as the name brand, but uh, gelatine, the
word is from Latin gelatas, meaning jellied froze, and uh
(18:45):
it was first used in Egypt, but it was really
first used in cooking in France, and um, you know
I think most people know this by now, but if
you don't, Um, gelatine is as a protein and it's
uh it's produced from collagen from boiling animal bones, yeah
(19:06):
or hoofs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a it's glutinous basically,
and it can go one of two ways, I think,
depending on what you do with it. You can turn
it into glue or you can turn it into food.
That's never a good start, no, it really you know. Yeah,
And a guy from the I think the seventeenth century
(19:27):
in France, what was his name, Peppin someone Peppin, Dennis
Poppin right, who may or may not be related to
Jacques Pepin. It was great and French. He's also a cook. Um.
He was the first person to mention it in writing,
I believe, uh. And then it just kind of sat
there for a while until the nineteenth century, when I
(19:50):
guess people were aware of gelatine and that you could
use it as a food, but it was extraordinarily gourmet,
like the average person was not making jello at home.
It was very time consuming. You you had to start
from scratch and boil animal bones to start the process
of gelatine. It was the exact opposite of how we
(20:11):
think of gelatine today, which is instantaneous. Yeah. So in
the nineteenth century, um, there there this guy named Peter
Cooper uh figured out a way to turn gelatine into
a powder form, a dehydrated gelatine powder. Um, and it
went absolutely nowhere for fifty years. And I was surprised
(20:33):
to find this out. I knew gelatine was pretty old,
but it's it's interesting how it's just kind of moved
along in these very slow little fits and starts, like
no one would give up on it, which is weird
because it's really disgusting if you think about it. It
should have been given up on. Yeah, and it never was.
It's a very bizarre in vention. It almost makes you
(20:55):
feel like there was some sort of divine hand guiding
gelatine along in its progress. Yeah. So, later on in
eight got named Charles Knox uh kind of revolutionized things
when he found came up with a process that resulted
in a dried sheet of gelatine, and he hired salesman
to go door to door to show women like, hey,
(21:16):
you can add liquid to these sheets, you can make desserts,
you can make aspects, which is a really gross word.
I think it is. It's not it's pretty. It's a
gross thing. It's a savory gelatine. Yeah, which we'll get
to that. But uh. A couple of years later, Rose Knox,
which was that his wife, I guess, yes, published a
(21:37):
book called Dainty Desserts, which is a book of recipes,
and uh, things were kind of moving along a little bit. Um.
Then in there was a cough syrup company in New
York called Pearl H Pearl B wait is that what
it's called? Pearl okay? W W A I T. But
(22:00):
they weren't selling much cough syrups, and he said, all right,
let's get into the food business. And uh, the wife,
whose name was May, said, you know, let me add
some fruit syrups to this stuff. And actually she's the
one who named it jello. She came up with that name.
But they didn't succeed either, and sold that to their neighbor.
(22:20):
Uh Francis is that the whole name, or to Francis Woodward, Yes,
for four hundred and fifty bucks. Uh. This person purchased
the name and name brand Jello, right, and he almost
fell victim to the curse of Jello as well. Right,
he could do nothing with it either. Um. Despite some
early attempts. He apparently tried to sell it to his
(22:43):
supervisor at work for thirty five bucks even though he
paid four hundred and fifty to it for it. So
at some point I guess he decided to give it
another go, and he hired a bunch of traveling salesman
sent them out to fairs, community gatherings, that kind of uff,
and said, teach the people how to make the jello.
(23:05):
And this time it started to stick. Actually, Jello Jello
kind of um hit at just the right time. Finally,
I should say, the world was finally ready for jello.
Part of it had to do with um, refrigeration, Yeah,
for sure, once you know, refrigeration is key for jello,
as we all know, right, And once those technologies were developed,
(23:25):
it kind of uh well it formed literally it all
congealed and figuratively. Uh. And then once advertising started taking over,
like in the mid nineteen thirties, Uh, General Foods UM
had a very famous radio ad from Jack Binny, uh
the j E L l O tag, which really kind
(23:47):
of helped push things along as well. Yeah, and I
noticed that at some point they started dabbling with with
other flavors. I think originally they tried strawberry, raspberry, orange,
and lemon, right um, And then they tried chocolate it
and they they apparently chocolate didn't go over very well,
so they were no. First they just released it as
chocolate jello. That's pretty awful. And then they thought, oh,
(24:10):
maybe we should add milk instead of water, and that's
when they came up with jello pudding, and they re
released chocolate and that that spurred like a whole pudding line,
including something I grew up on, which was butterscotch jello pudding.
Oh yeah, man, that was so good, except you you couldn't.
You had to get the skin off. The skin was
no good, But everything under the skin was great. What's
(24:32):
the skin? It was just like a on top. It
was a very it was the tougher layer on top. Yeah,
but if you just scraped it off, you had some
nice pudding underneath. Emily still loves the the brown, the
chocolate jello pudding. Yeah it's good. Yeah. She'll make a
parfait like you know, a little a little putting, a
(24:54):
little whipped cream, a little pudding, little whipped cream. She
knows how to live she does. It's a special night
they have is about three times a year, and I'm like,
oh boy, it's time. Uh So in the nineteen fifties, uh,
supposedly the jello shot with alcohol was invented by uh,
this really interesting guy named Tom Lair who Um he's
(25:14):
a mathematician and a singer songwriter who I looked into him.
He did song parodies about math and chemistry. I guess
he was like the Jonathan Colton of his day as
far as I can tell. And he was also in
the army and to get around alcohol restrictions. As the
story goes, he claims he invented the jello shot, which
I've never had. Uh what, I've never had a jello shot? Wow,
(25:40):
well you're not missing much of the pretty gross well jello.
I can't stand jello. Well, even if you do, even
if you like or or ambivalent to jello, it's it's
just gross. Does it taste like, yeah, it's tequila jello
or whatever. It's a very obnoxious taste. You're supposed to
use like I think you're a place half of the
water with whatever liquor you're using. Usually people use vodka.
(26:02):
It really just stands out in a in a noxious way.
By the way, Tom Larra I thought that name sounded familiar.
He um, he is pretty great. He wrote this one
um song called the Old Dope Peddler and two Chains Actually, um,
you know the rapper two Chains from Atlanta? Yes you do?
Oh wait was he our guy? Was he the guy
(26:24):
that judged that? No? No? Oh, man, who was that guy?
That was young Jock? Right? No? Two Chains is he's
huge man. Um. He did a song where he sampled
the Old Dope Peddler and he, I guess wrote to
Tom Laird to ask for permission to sample, and Tom
Lair had this awesome famous response. So just read up
(26:46):
on that. What was did he let him use it? Yes?
Oh great. So he's the opposite of Don Henley and
probably every single way yeah yeah, uh but jello shots,
jello shots are gross. So jello is speeding along. It's uh,
it's taking over America. Um. And then they decided to
(27:08):
come out with these savory lines and it became uh
and this was this post World War two thing that
you were talking about when um, I guess they did what.
There was this great article you sent Making and Eating
the nineteen fifties most nauseating jello soaked recipes. Yeah, Hunter
Hunter Oatman Stanford and uh, they did this interview and
(27:31):
um with Ruth Clark. Yeah, Ruth Clark. Basically it's a
really good interview and she talks about kind of this
savory movement that took over, and not only with Jello,
but the fact that it was a time in America
where and if you look back, it's so great to
look back at these old ads and these old recipe
books that it was a time where you would the
(27:55):
goal was to have a dinner party with this big, flashy, uh,
experimental and unique centerpiece food centerpiece made of jello. Well,
all kinds of things. We're talking about the hot dog
tree right yeah, there and there there. It could be
a lot of different stuff, And I think that's what
Ruth Clark does. She recreates this stuff right, and her
(28:17):
poor husband has to eat it. Um. But a lot
of those things were Jello molds. And a lot of
the reason why jello molds were so weird and so
popular is because Jello put so much time and effort
into publishing cookbooks. And the whole point was all of
these food companies wanted, like all of their products to
(28:38):
to be your entire meal. So they were putting these
these random parts like products that the food company made
into some really weird configurations, and they came up with
some very odd jello molds in the fifties or sixties.
Such a sad culinary time it was. But the Ruth
Clark makes a good point that that to the people
(28:59):
at that time, like a really well thought out, fancy
jello mold was as a centerpiece of your table was
like the pinnacle of classiness. Yeah, but we're talking about
like a shaped mold with like uh lamb shank and
asparagus inside of jello. A savory jello that's like celery flavored.
(29:23):
You're lucky if it was savory. The lime jello was
one of the most abused jello flavors of all time.
People would put tuna and stuff in with the lime jello.
There's one called Perfection salad that's cold slaw inside of
lime jello. And what Ruth Clark pointed out was that
gelatin apparently preserves food really well, and and that cole
(29:47):
slaw that would have otherwise been inedible and running after
day three was still like crunchy after day five. When
it was put inside of a jello mold. Still gross. Yeah.
There's actually a great BuzzFeed article, um if you want
to get an idea of what people were doing in
the fifties, sixties, and seventies with jello molds. It's called
seventeen Horrifying, lee disgusting retro Gelatin recipes and they are gross.
(30:11):
Man like cottage cheese and salmon mold. Yeah, yeah, I
mean I hate jello oh man, like you're waking nightmare.
I didn't even look through it. You sent it to
me and that scrolled about halfway through and just deleted
through my computer out the window. The best one I
see is lime cheese salad. It's it's lime jello mixed
with cottage cheese and then into the center of the
(30:34):
jello mold you put a seafood salad. Oh my god,
sour kraut mold. It just goes on and on. But
it was a weird time and again. Ruth Clark has
a bunch of theories. She said she can't really answer
exactly why jello molds were as big as they are,
but she posits that, uh, part of it was this
idea that there were all these companies trying to get
(30:56):
you to use their products. And these were just monstos
cities that they came up with, and people fell for it.
Uh like can salmon, can tuna in jell o? Right,
Oh my god, so that's jello olds Man. Uh, where
do you want to head next? Let's go to the
crock pot. All right, do a little that was a
(31:23):
crock pot travel. So first of all, I have a
croc pot the same here, and um, it's yours. Actually
croc Pot are using it as a proprietary eponym. I
don't think it is a croc Pot brand pot. Yeah,
it's a slow cooker, um, and I'd forget to use
it a lot, but when I remember, I'll go in
(31:45):
a little crock pot binge where I'll cook, you know,
a few meals over the course of a few weeks
in a croc pot and they're still great if you
know how to how to use it and how to
spice things up for sure. You know. Apparently at first
people didn't know because if you're cooking a recipe, say, um,
it's like simmering, say like a beef stew on the stovetop,
(32:11):
that simmering action that it's going undergoing it does something
different to the recipe than a croc pot does, even
though it's the exact same recipe. Um. And so at
first when croc pots came out, it was first introduced
by rival. Back in when croc pots first came out, um,
they people were like, this is this this dinner that
(32:35):
it's making is really gross. It doesn't taste very good.
It's bland, and yet they still didn't stop using or
buying croc pots. Well, food was more bland back then.
Well we're talking the seventies, so by the seventies, I
think it was the people were using more spices than before.
I think it was more bland, and like the forties
and maybe the fifties. Yeah, but that one, yeah, you're
(32:57):
probably right, But that one article we read said, you know,
like an old recipe for chili would have like a
teaspoon of chili powder or something, and it's like all
the food just sucked because they didn't realize like, no, man,
you dump a bunch of that junk in there. So well,
you were saying back in the forties or fifties, when
TV dinners really hit, moms were starting to enter the
(33:18):
work force. In nine moms were really into the workforce.
And so the idea of having a crock pot where
you could make this meal in a one pot in
the morning, throw it all in there, turn it on,
and then come home at the end of the day
and dinner was ready and you still went to work
and got everything you needed to get done done was
(33:38):
so attractive that just that despite the fact that it
made these meals that did not taste like they should, um,
people were still, like I said, they were still buying
the crock pots and instead they started to look around
to find tips for how to make these things taste better.
And actually a woman named what was her name, Mabel, Yeah,
(33:59):
Mabel Hoffman, Mabel Hoffman, stepped into the fray and said,
piece piece, children, I've got this covered. Listen up. Yeah.
She wrote a book called The Crockery Cookery or Crockery
Cookery No the and uh it was a huge, huge hit,
was the New York Times bestseller. I believe she went
(34:19):
on to sell about six million copies of this thing.
And um, I don't even think we've said that, you know,
we said we you throw the food in there and
cook it all day. But the whole idea is that
you put a kind of a tight fitting lid on
there and it and it cooks at a very very
low heat all day long. Right, and then when you
when you get home from work eight hours later or
(34:41):
something like that, it will it will be done, and
you just serve and smile. Yeah, And thanks to Crockery Cookery, UM,
the crock pot uh in nineteen seventy one or two
million bucks and seventy two, ten million, seventy three, twenty
three million, and then eventually peeking in nineteen seventy five
at nine three million dollar urs worth of croc pots
(35:02):
being sold. It was a genuine, legit craze, food craze
and supposedly crock pot cookery. The book was UM America's
sixth best selling cookbook ever. Right, so this was like
a legitimate craze. Crock Pot cooking was a legitimate craze.
But again there was something compared to the same recipes
on the stovetop as compared to a croc pot. Um,
(35:24):
there was something. It was the flavor was just disappointing.
So what Mabel Hoffman did was on a very tight
deadline UM create from scratch a book, I guess, the
world's first cookbook of slow cooker recipes, and she did
it in her own kitchen with like twenty croc pots
going all day every day. She had to testing all
(35:45):
this stuff, and she figured out some of the keys
to crock pot cooking, which was, like, you want to
use way less liquid um thing you would use like
on the stovetop, because you have a lot less um evaporation.
The crock pot keeps sit in there, which is one
reason why meat is so so tender, and a croc
pot or slow cooker um because it just recirculates the
(36:09):
the moisture rather than allowing it to just evaporate. Right.
And then another thing she came up with was that
when you um, when you use herbs into the recipe,
you want to reserve some of them for right before
the things finished cooking, so you can add it like
a pop of fresh flavor. Yes. So once she figured
this out, crock pots just took off even more. Yeah,
(36:31):
so she was they were selling a bunch of crock pots,
she was selling a bunch of cookbooks. Uh. And eventually
she would said, hey, I really was onto something here.
So she wrote Deep Prye Cookery, Chocolate Cookery. Uh, and
these are seventy nine, um, seventy seven, like kind of
all in a row crape cookery and then eventually uh healthy,
(36:53):
healthy crockery cookery and um. The person you who interviewed
her later in life said that she was just this
really great lady, very humble, and was super upfront about
the fact that she like, hey, I hit something at
the right time with the right book, and it just
(37:13):
sort of I kind of fell into this and it's
been just like a wonderful thing for my life. Yeah,
it's really neat. Yeah, she sounds like a pretty cool person.
So what's your what's your crock pot recipe? Oh? Jeez,
I don't know it's your favorite thing to cook, but
usually some sort of like beef. Yeah, it just does
such a such a good job, like making a roast
or something, you know. Um, but yeah, I that's usually
(37:38):
what I'm cooking when I cook in a crock pot.
Is is beef? All right? Josh's croc pot beef croc
pot surprise right with aspect? Uh, you want to take
a break, Yeah, let's take a break and we'll finish
up with a bit interesting bit on oat brand so chuck. Yes,
(38:16):
we finally arrived We're just gonna go forward a few
years Blue the way Back Machine is in the shop.
This is why I'm having to do it to the
eighties man an oat Brand. Yes, I know that we
differ on the interestingness of this one. I'm just fascinated
(38:36):
by it. I really am, man, because it's got it all.
It's like, um, it's got the eighties. Um. Do you
remember that snl the famous snl um add colon for
colon blow that was based on this came out of
this this trend. Um has to do with studies, studies
(38:56):
that contradict those studies. Um, bad science reporting the whole thing.
I love it, oats oh brand. It's very important. So
there was this huge trend in the eighties where anything
that had to do with oprand you could sell a
million units of a minute. Yes, um. So much so
(39:19):
that there was a article from Tulsa World that UM
said that there were no I'm sorry, the l A
Times article from said that they were over like three
different items available in grocery stores at the time that
touted on its label the fact that it had oprand
and people were nuts for it. Yes they were. And
(39:40):
this is uh largely due to some studies that came
out that said that brand was kind of a miracle
food for lowering cholesterol, right, And that was like back
in the late seventies, and and I guess Quaker Oats
took notice of those studies and they released a thing
called Mother's opran but they sent it straight to the
(40:00):
hippies at the health food store and just and didn't
do anything about They just released a product and that
was that. And then Kellogg's came along and said, hey,
you know what, what if we start telling people that
are food can basically prevent cancer? Can we do that?
And the lawyers said no, And the president of Kelloggs said, well,
we're doing it anyway. Who's gonna stop us, Reagan? And
(40:24):
Reagan said no, I'm not gonna stop you, Reagan, thank you.
And so they said, um, okay, well you eat our
cereal and it will reduce cancer. And nothing happened. There
was no blowback, despite the fact that this has been
illegal for nearly a century. And then Quaker Oats partnered
with Chicago's Northwestern University and Linda Van horn In because
(40:47):
they had a similar study about brand cutting cholesterol. Right,
so they're starting to say, well, Kelleg didn't get in trouble.
Let's try this ourselves. And they went out and they
hired Wilfred Brimley. Remember his ads. Yeah, I think I
told the story about working with him. Oh yeah, it
wasn't he like the antithesis of what his his persona was. Yeah,
(41:09):
the word got around they were like this, you know,
just maybe a short day, because that's how it goes
with him sometimes it's so funny. And I think it was.
I think we wrapped it about half day because he
was just like, I'm done, I'm cantankerous. But in the meantime,
when the cameras were rolling, he he told everybody that
eating quicker opra and was the right thing to do
and it would cut your cholesterol, that's right. And then
(41:30):
this book came out, So things are starting to build
here for opra. And this book came out called The
Eight Week Cholesterol Cure by a guy named Robert E. Kowalski,
and it chronicled his the decline of his l d L,
the bad cholesterol um just from eating an opra and diet.
And that book became extraordinarily popular, supposedly was the the
(41:53):
one of the greatest selling self help health books of
all time. It just took off. Yeah, and then yet
another thing happened, and this was the thing. This is
like where the peak began the UM. I think the
Journal of the American Medical Association April published a study
(42:14):
from the University of Maryland where these researchers found that, yeah,
eating oprand could really significantly lower your cholesterol, and not
only that, it does it for a six of the
price of the expensive cholesterol lowering drugs. That's right, and
people ate even more oat brand That's right. The trend
(42:35):
is developing, can you see it. I think it's fully
developed at this point. So everybody's going opran crazy. And
one of the big things that UM that they were
doing was eating Oprand muffins. But these opra and muffins
were like loaded with fat and butter and eggs, and
so they weren't actually doing anything to lower their cholesterol
(42:55):
because the effects would be counteracted, right, But in the
in the meantime, people were still having fun eating lots
of muffins and pretending they were really healthy. And then
this Harvard study came out and it basically said, you
know what, UM, you're all fools, You're dummies. You know
how it lowers your cholesterol because it keeps you from
eating bacon and eggs. That's how you chumps. Well yeah,
(43:18):
and then that study itself was attacked because they only
studied twenty people, um, which is not much of a study.
It isn't and the people who were on the Opran
diet were eating more fat than the control group. It
was a terrible study, almost like they wanted to take
Oprand down a peg and it worked really well. It's
(43:38):
basically the um science. Reporting in major newspapers and the
news services reported that Oprand was the greatest thing ever,
and then they suddenly turned on it and said Opran
is nothing, and everybody dropped Opran and the if if
you read the stuff today, it's true Oprand really does
lower cholesterol. Um, but he just got overhyped because of
(44:03):
the eighties. That's the eighties for you. That's food fads. Man,
You got anything else? I got nothing else? All right? Man? Well,
if you want to know more about food fans, you
can type those words into the search part how stuff
works dot com search bar. You're not gonna get much, though,
so you may want to just look elsewhere. But still, uh,
(44:24):
since I said that it's time for a listener mail.
I'm gonna call this m S response, and I would
like to say that we got many, many, oh great
responses from our MS episode. A lot of warm thoughts
from people about my friend Billy and just uh it
was just really great people with MS, people who had
(44:46):
people in their family. We heard from doctors and nurses,
and that's just ended up being a really good episode.
So we appreciate that feedback. But this is from anonymous listener. Hey,
I've been listening to your show for a couple of
years now. I want to thank you for making my
commute more engaging. Listened to the show on MS AM
I right home and like to commend you for how
(45:06):
well you handle the topic. I was diagnosed a few
years ago at nineteen uh. Luckily my diagnosis was quick
due to the severity of my first relapse, and I
feel like your podcast would have helped me understanding cope
with the diagnosis in a more constructive manner than my
initially trying to self destruct. Since then, I'm continually uh
learning about the latest research in history. I love that
(45:26):
you discussed uh Ledwina and Augustus death Day as a
lot of the time, they don't come up in the
mainstream discourse of MS. Didn't really know any history until
I wrote an undergrad history paper on MS last year
and found reading through bits of death Day's journal to
be the closest I've ever felt with a historical person.
You mentioned that many tend to keep their diagnosis a secret.
(45:49):
I'll admit that with me, it's a need to know basis,
and I rarely openly talk about it outside of family, friends,
in the support system, and my support system, mainly because
of the stigma of the disease and that the assumption
circulating MS tend to negatively alter people's perceptions of myself
as an individual. Have had people approach me when I
start limping thanks to fatigue and a permanently numb foot,
(46:12):
but I'll rush it off and tell them there's nothing
to worry about or it's an old injury. However, I
think with time it's getting easier to talk about thanks
to resources like your podcasts that are well researched and accurate.
I cringe whenever someone tells me there's an easy homeopathic
solution to my ailments, and sometimes I struggle with discussing
MS in an accessible way that doesn't solely rely on
(46:34):
the clinical pathological understanding of it. And I will be
sure in the future to redirect people to this episode.
Thank you so much for sharing. And uh, we said
we keep this anonymous because this person. Yeah, this person said,
you know, that's great that you read it. But uh,
if if they're keeping it quiet for now, we don't
want to you know, broadcast the names. Yeah nice, so
(47:00):
okay anonymous? Yeah, thanks anonymous. Uh. If you want to
get in touch with us, like anonymous did, you can
tweet to us. Yeah, I guess i'd be anonymous. Um,
I'm at josh um Clark and at s Y s
K podcast. You can hang out with Chuck on Facebook
dot com slash Stuff you Should Know or at Charles W.
(47:20):
Chuck Bryant on Facebook. You can send us both an email. Uh.
We promised to be confidential at Stuff podcast, at how
Stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at
our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot
com For more on this and thousands of other topics,
is it how Stuff Works dot com
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