Watch it wobble

The fondness for retro desserts – items that might appear on a table in the TV show Mad Men – is still going strong several years after it emerged. B. Dylan Hollis has crafted a career from retro cakes and other sweets from vintage cookbooks, and TikTok and Instagram are filled with other creators putting old recipes to the test. The Guardian’s Tim Dowling recently looked at one aspect (or should I say aspic) of this trend, revisiting jelly desserts (and savories) from bygone eras.

It would be safe to say that overall, Dowling is not enamored with the results. He only recommended three of the six recipes he tried, being especially critical of the only savory option in the bunch. “We often use the word “bland” as a synonym for inoffensive, but it turns out some things can be both bland and offensive. Cold chicken stock-flavoured jelly is one of those things,” he says wryly. I agree with him that many of the retro jelled side dishes and main courses that feature gelatin look off-putting, to say the least. Some are downright reviling, and you have to wonder how much daytime gin drinking had to do with their creation. Ironically, the gin and tonic jelly was the dessert that received the most positive feedback from Dowling’s guests.

In between describing the various jellied dishes, Dowling explains some of the pitfalls you will encounter when making these recipes. “I can’t stress this enough: ignore whatever any recipe tells you in terms of timing, judge the setting by eye, and be prepared to stay up all night,” he says of a layered jelly dessert recipe. One of the recipes required a whopping 19 sheets of gelatin, and even that wasn’t enough because shortly after Dowling unmolded it, “the whole thing collapsed before my eyes, like a citadel in an earthquake.”