jello2

November 24, 2020

The New Joys of Jello Chronicles Part 2

The New Joys of Jello begins with a lemony gold paragraph:

The joys of Jello gelatin are never ending. The same Jello gelatin that made a cool dessert many years ago is still a shimmering example of versatility. Make it simple or elegant. Make it dessert or salad. Make it for family or for special occasion. In any form, Jello gelatin has a light, refreshing, fresh fruity taste.

No writer of this brilliant passage is credited. I liked this omission as a crime against the literature of food. Who was this literary genius of Jello?

The premise of this book is obvious: Jello should go into everything edible because it makes everything more colorful and fun, including the following recipe, which I conclude must have been intended as a laxative.

Jellied Prune Whip

1 package Jello (orange or lemon)

1 cup boiling water

¾ cup cold water

¼ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon grated orange rind

¼ cup sugar

1 ½ cups chopped prune pulp

I’ll spare you all the cooking directions and just hit the highlights:

“Fold prune pulp into whipped gelatin…pile into sherbet glasses…serve with custard sauce or light cream…”

They forgot to add, “Consume, wait several hours, and then dump elegantly and comfortably…”

The New Joys of Jello (as opposed to the old joys) is positively giddy about demonstrating creative ways to integrate jello into every element of cuisine, and as shown above, maintaining personal health. The inventors of these recipes, (who were these mad chefs working secretly in gleaming test kitchens?) even presented ways to party with Jello, I mean really party with panache. This idea seemingly started out with good intentions, but somewhere along the line, devolved into the cultural horror now practiced gracelessly around America known as the Jello shot.

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The Old Crow

Book Club

$11.99 + $3 Shipping

In December of 2020, author Matt Love moved to Portland to care for his elderly father.

Returning to the Rose City jolted Love after 23 years residing on the Oregon Coast. In the Sellwood neighborhood where he lived, Love met a homeless man named Mark. They formed a friendship over literature and the unforeseen magical discoveries in street libraries. They created The Old Crow Book Club, and yes, sometimes that involved drinking Old Crow on a sidewalk.

The club also included several other Sellwood homeless men and women cut from John Steinbeck's Cannery Row cloth.

In due course, Love learned the members' stories of homelessness and how they survived. He wondered what happened to his beloved state of Oregon and attempted to help Mark get off the streets only to run up against the seemingly futile policies to address the crisis.

Along the way, he had the best conversations about books in his life and wrote The Old Crow Book Club, where he recounts his interactions with the homeless people in his neighborhood and offers some suggestions how to alleviate what he considers the greatest man-made American humanitarian disaster of his adult life.

The Old Crow Book Club is available for purchase here and select independent bookstores in Oregon.

Choice Cuts

of Oregon Fiction

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Choice Cuts of Oregon Fiction by Matt Love contains 20 stories, all set in Oregon. The cast of characters includes a depressed Santa Claus, Steve Prefontaine, Jack Ramsay's fast break offense, socialist squirrels, a clearcut, a dead deer, a junior high football team, a high school tennis player, a dissipated teacher, a man who evolves into a beaver, a homeless vet, a jilted preacher, a double date to a prom, rural degenerates, a wily caterer, and much more.

The publication of the collection culminates a quarter century of the author's writing about Oregon and rambling around the state.

Choice Cuts is available for purchase here, through Amazon, or select independent bookstores in Oregon.

The Savage

of State Street

Nestucca Spit Press is proud to present The Savage of State Street: The Thieving and Literary Lives of Smoky Epley. He is the greatest unheralded writer in Oregon history and also one of its more mediocre, colorful and persistent thieves.

$19.99 + $3 Shipping

In 1973, Oregon State University Press published Men in Exile: An Anthology of Creative Writing by Inmates of the Oregon State Penitentiary. Twenty-two of Smoky Epley's pieces appeared in the book.

Smoky spent most of his adult life in state and federal prisons for robbery. In 2008, during one of his brief stints of freedom, Smoky became friends with Matt Love, an Oregon author and publisher. They met after Love discovered Men in Exile and wrote a newspaper column about the landmark book. Smoky read the column and reached out.

He returned to prison in 2009 after forging a check. Upon his release in 2011, Love encouraged Smoky to write a memoir. He completed half of Auto before dying in February of 2013.