To me Bird's was always the make for custard and blancmange powders
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Squelchy green jelly - or jello, if you are American
I was thinking back to childhood birthday parties with “jelly and ice-cream”. Then I thought further back and remembered we didn’t have a fridge, let alone a freezer or ice-box. No, we used to have “jelly and blancmange”.
The jelly was ever present when I was a child. We made it every week for Sunday teatime, when we had fish-paste sandwiches and then jelly with tinned mandarin oranges and Ideal milk. Richer friends had Carnation condensed milk, but we always had the little blue-and-white-striped Ideal tins.
I remember helping my mother pull apart the separate cubes of jelly, which were put in a Pyrex bowl with boiling water until the cubes had all melted (they turned into globby spheres before disappearing).
When it had cooled a little it was put in a thick glass mould to set and when it was solid it was turned out, quivering, from the mould.
This lovely bracelet from Pink Turtle Trading SO reminds me of cubes of jelly
We had two sorts of mould – the standard fluted one with bobbles on top and one like a rabbit. I think I’ve still got the bobbly one somewhere in the garage, but can’t quite find it.
Glass jelly moulds
Do you remember that squelching sound the spoon made when cutting off a piece of jelly and putting it into individual bowls?
The rabbit mould was flatter and was mainly used for blancmange, which was usually strawberry or raspberry, although vanilla and chocolate were also available. It was made from a packet of powder, mixed with milk – warm milk, I think. Here’s a great website with recipes: The Modern Gelatina.
Pink blancmange - it was always pink - this image is from The Modern Gelatina
Blancmange comes from the French blanc-manger, literally “white-to eat”. It’s pronounced “blummonge” although I toyed with “blank-manj” as a word-loving child.
The word jelly also comes from the French, gelée, from geler (Latin gelare), meaning “to freeze”. Although in America it has become “jello” from Kraft’s “Jell-O” brand name.
Jell-o was originally a Kraft trademark - click on the picture to find out more about Jell-o and kewpie dolls!
According to Wikipedia the original dish was a meaty one, of chicken, milk or almond milk, rice and sugar. It was deemed to be an ideal food for the sick.
There were many similar dishes all over Europe and I particularly like the 13th century Danish name hwit moos, meaning “white mush”. I wonder if that’s where the word “mousse” comes from? Although the Chambers dictionary gives it as the French word for “moss”.
Mousse was another thing – I think it was the first ready-made dessert we used to buy from the grocery shop.
As time went by, we gave up on blancmange and started to make milk jelly, which was marketed as such, but I guess it was just ordinary jelly you added milk to.
We also went through a phase of living on Angel Delight, which I see is still available. Again just a powder you mix with milk and whip up a little.
Modern Angel Delight packaging designed by Melonie Beeson
But the ultimate treat was eventually jelly and ice-cream. We still didn’t have a fridge or freezer, but we lived opposite the village shop, so could buy a block of ice-cream and wrap it in thick newspaper. It would then keep cold for a few hours until we could eat it.
The creme de la creme at the time was Neapolitan ice-cream, with stripes of chocolate, vanilla and raspberry. Later my favourite was raspberry ripple, which still came in a block packaged in card, rather than the much later plastic tubs.
The ice-cream from the village shop was always “Cornish” ice-cream, so the vanilla was always a rich golden colour, not white.
This is just the colour of Neapolitan ice-cream as I remember it - here it is used in a colour scheme for baby wear from sweet-pickles.com!
There were two rival manufacturers in those days – Wall’s and Lyons Maid. The shop sold Wall’s ice-cream.
My big brother spent one summer driving a Tonibell ice-cream van and I often went with him. I think the jingling tune it played when it stopped to sell was “Girls and Boys Come out to Play”. Those were the days.
A model Tonibell van - click on the image to go to a website that also sells Wall's and Lyons Maid vans...
And those were also the days, in the early 1960s, of jelly sandals. They were very useful when going on a trip to the seaside at Barry Island.
That was the first time around for jellies, but they have made a great comeback in the last few years.
Jelly sandals suit all ages - these remind me of the ones I had as a child, although the colours are more vivid
These are far more modern jellies, suiting the current fashion for slave sandals
So jelly (jello) never went away and jellies are back with us, but what chance for a modern blancmange marketing campaign?
The Squirrelbasket 
Ideal milk! There’s a blast from the past on a cold, grey Tuesday afternoon. Is it still available? I’ve now developed a hankering…
Woo, you’re quick on the draw this afternoon!
I wondered about Ideal milk myself – I suspect it’s owned by Nestle now and they sell Carnation as well, so they may have discontinued it in most countries.
But you can still buy it in Ghana… see this link
Have a good afternoon – wet and windy (and, as you say, grey) day here as well.
Thanks for commenting.
x
It’s remarkable, in an era without domestic refrigeration (mostly), and use-by dates unthought-of, that we managed – conspicuously – not to die in droves!
When I was about 6, living in the slums of Manchester, we had a wooden meat safe, with a zinc mesh door. One mid-winter weekend, we went off to Liverpool to see my grandparents, leaving a roasted leg of lamb in the safe, locked with a hook and eye, to keep the cat out (we must have had mice, but I never saw any – I think the spiders got ’em!). When we got back, 2 days later, the meat safe was still locked, but the meat and the plate it was on were gone.
My father searched the place – 2 up, 2 down, didn’t take long – but there was no sign of a break-in. Or of the meat.
Several months later, as the stock of coal in the “coal-‘ole” (off the kitchen), diminished, a rim of blue appeared and there, under what had been a ton of winter coal (built up in the summer when it was cheaper), was the missing plate, and the bone, which was all that was left of the meat.
We never did figure it out, not least because what had happened was patently impossible. You don’t get mysteries like that with a boring fridge!
Oh wow, great story!
I think we must have lived in a very similar house.
We had a pantry at first but later a meat safe just as you describe, except it was all made of zinc, not wood. I hated it, though, as it became dirty and I once found some leftover shoulder of lamb in it (we couldn’t afford leg) – covered in maggots. Oooh, it put me off!
We also had a coal hole, but ours was under the stairs, off the “front kitchen” (living room). Full of spiders, of course…
Do keep up the anecdotes – I love ’em!
x
Try this one for size, then:-
http://ronsrants.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/tales-of-the-supernatural-part-1/
It’s really too long to post here.
Hi, Pat – thanks for this lovely reminder of heavenly childhood treats!!! Light and innocent, they invoke nostalgia in a way that more serious and grown-up desserts never could. Ice cream with jello is still one of my favourites. Enjoyed this post immensely!!
Thanks for that – although I still can’t get used to your calling it jello!
Best wishes
xxx
Minnesota journalist James Lileks has had fun with Jell-o and “gil cookery.”
http://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/knox/index.html
Thanks for the great link!
Interesting. I wonder what Lilek would make of the Dreadful Delia?
Or even Lileks!
Glad y’all enjoyed Lileks. A bit irreverent, but he has a good eye for playing with pop culture, especially the cheesier bits of commercialized mid-Century architecture.
You’ll have to get me up to speed about Dreadful Delia though.
(apologies for the typo in the earlier comment.)
Childhood memories of a depressed Poole of the 1950’s of making a luxurious jelly with Ideal milk (No Carnation too expensive) and maybe on Sunday a Wall’s 1/-0d Neopolitan Ice cream brick carefully cut by dad and watched by eagle eyed children reminded me of another very precious jelly.
The Sunday meal was nearly always a modest piece of beef or lamb, roasted with home grown potatoes, carrots and cabbage served with Bisto Gravy. The meat was sliced very thinly and we had one slice each. The remainder was carefully wrapped and put in the pantry to be made into sandwiches on Monday and Tuesday, the left overs making curry, mince or soup with the bone and trimmings on other days of the week. The “dripping” from the roast was carefully kept in the dripping pot and spread on toast for breakfast and the rich brown Jelly underneath the dripping was the luxury bonus. A sprinkle of salt finished the preparation. “Dripping” was used to fry chips and the beef fat was used over and over and never seemed to go “off”. I clearly remember the solid fat being melted in the chip fryer on the stove. As dad used to say, Jelly was made from horses’ hooves but it was to us a heavenly dessert and we didn’t mind.
We did not have a cooked tea any more than 3 times a week. We had cooked dinners at school. So why have another? So mostly, especially in Summer we just had a sandwich, Usually it was sandwich spread or home made jam but once in a while it was bread spread with condensed milk. A piece of fruit cake for dessert was usual and a cup of tea or cocoa. We rarely had bananas but oranges apples and pears were frequent. Blackberry season of course changed our diets dramatically.Rhubarb and apple crumble with the “top of the milk” and once in a while some “orange juice” delivered in a small bottle by the milkman.Life was certainly simple then.
Lovely memories! Thanks for sharing…
I loved ideal milk, HATED condensed milk and never had Carnation, although I can recall the crimson and white tin (Ideal was a blue and white striped tin with red writing, wasn’t it?). We always had Ideal milk over tinned mandarin oranges for Sunday tea, after Shippam’s salmon paste sandwiches…
It’s funny we had ice-cream bricks, not tubs in those days… I used to eat the pink and white bits of Neapolitan but didn’t like the chocolate stripe.
As for Sunday lunch, here in Wales we always had shoulder of lamb and I ate leftover slices cold for supper, with lots of solid white fat in it and covered in Heinz tomato sauce (ALWAYS Heinz, even if we were poor!)…
Stop by again and tell us more.
Best wishes 🙂
Thank you for the memories of my childhood sweets.
Very happy to have brought back sweet memories for you 🙂
Well, I was lookig for the reason that custard is so different from blancmange, asi am trying to make blancamnge for my husband’s birthday. He is vegan so it’ll have to be custard made with water and soya milk with vegan jelly and fruit under it. Not quite a trifle but the best i can do.
I absolutely loved all the chat about the old days as we tend to call them – we too had jelly and blancamnge as a treat though, being poor and often insufficient to eat of anything. We too in our childhood had dripping on our bread and loved it if we got a smear of the brown jelly with it, and a little salt.
And the Ideal milk in its striped tin, my father would have nothing else in his tea, and if we were good, we’d be allowed some too. How much more simple were our ideas of treats and delicious food! We had no shops near us so ice-cream was unheard of until my Nan got a fridge with an icebox that my rish auntie had passed on to her. It was HUGE on the outside and quite small on the inside but worked for years. Wedidn’t know we were missing anything because we had no neighbours and took a sandwich in a little tin for school lunches. Those were the days!.
Thank you for sharing your memories!
And thank you for reminding me about that old post of mine, which I hadn’t read for a while. I must write some more nostalgia.
So you had rich aunties, too?
My father had trouble understanding the difference between a fridge and an ice-box and used to leave bags of frozen peas in the fridge, thinking they would last for ever. After a few months they were green – or should I say a different and more unpleasant green than the way they began.
All the best 🙂
Wow, bread and dripping. That takes me back more years than I care to contemplate, and reminds me of other staples like grinding up the remnants of the Sunday roast to make “mince with beans in”, and my perennial favorite “Shushee”, a whipped milk jelly, usually strawberry or raspberry. Fish and meat paste sandwiches, I remember them every time I open a tin of cat food.
I hadn’t heard of any of that – apart from the fish paste! We always had “Shippam’s” spread.
And cut our fingers so often on the ring of tin that kept the lid on.
All the best 🙂