The trouble starts right there in the title, doesn’t it? There are some things that don’t go well with seafood (including, but by no means limited to, shellfish allergies, office microwaves, and trucks with South Dakota license plates), and Jell-O is unquestionably one of them. And yet, thanks to midcentury America’s enduring fascination with putting random stuff in Jell-O molds and seeing what would happen, we got tuna Jell-O salad, one of the many vintage seafood dishes we’re in no hurry to see on our tables again.
First, a little context. All those wild Jell-O salad recipes came about in the early 20th century because gelatin was very good at storing food and excellent at stretching ingredients as far as they could go. Not to mention, it was quite cheap, which was a blessing during the Great Depression. In the heady days following World War II, a wave of innovations transformed the way America cooked and ate (TV dinners, microwaves, things of that nature), but women were still expected to put in as much effort as they always had. So they used extravagant Jell-O molds to contain increasingly esoteric savory dishes, with the elaborate presentation just as much of a selling point as the actual flavor — if not more so. Hence, tuna Jell-O salad.
Tuna Jell-O salad is as strange as you’d expect
The interesting thing about tuna Jell-O salad is that, were it not for the Jell-O, you’d actually have a pretty solid recipe on your hands. It contains tuna, of course, as well as celery, some yellow peppers and pimentos, and some chopped-up walnuts and hard-boiled eggs. That’s a perfectly respectable tuna salad recipe! Sure, you’d have to calibrate it to your own tastes, but there’s nothing wrong with it on paper. But then you get to the cheese (apparently chunks of Velveeta, as if it couldn’t get any worse), and then you get to the lime Jell-O, and then (if you’re anything like us) you probably need to lie down for a good long while.
This would be understandable — if not forgivable, then understandable — if the Jell-O salad looked impressive in the middle of your table. And, sure, maybe we can chalk it up to being a different time (we’re sure our grandkids will be rolling their eyes over us making a big hullabaloo over Dubai chocolate), but just look at it. We’ve seen poison dart frogs in the Amazon rainforest that looked less dangerous to eat than the Eye of Sauron-looking monstrosity you see pictured above. Eventually, though, the Jell-O craze died down, and we got back to using gelatin the way it was meant to be used: for desserts, marshmallows, and Jell-O shots.
