Mean, green Avocado Pie: Vintage Recipe Roulette

The Joy of Jell-O, the potential despair of wasting an avocado

This week, an offering from the 1968 Joys of Jell-O cookbook! Doesn’t it make you happy just to look at the cover?

My personal copy of the classic

Try to hold on to that feeling as you read the recipe I’ve chosen.

Jell-O, cream cheese, crushed pineapple, and honest to goodness avocado all in a graham crust. Since this is a commercial recipe, it’s pretty thorough compared to community recipes, but it’s not immune to oversights…One of the things that I enjoy most about this monstrosity is that in order to enact the Eye of Sauron garnish, one needs a second, unlisted can of pineapple slices.

I count avocados as one of my favorite foods, and I’ve always wanted to make one of the avocado pies landmining the various mid-century cookbooks like cow pies in a beautiful meadow. It gives me an opportunity to flex my storehouse of useless trivia muscles! Did you know that the giant sloth is responsible for the evolutionary success of the avocado tree? No? Good! That means you won’t have to unlearn that tidbit, because it’s not true. There’s a great video from Hank Green at SciShow about how such rumors get started and how this mystery was solved if you’d like to hear more, but in short, avocados owe their botanical spread to Central American humans, who have loved them for millennia. They weren’t terribly common outside of the places that grew them, though, until the 1950s, when their popularity skyrocketed in the northern United States, as the unspeakable taboo of their supposed aphrodisiac qualities faded. So smirk all you want — this recipe was the sexy açaí bowl of its time. This recipe is high fashion.

I’ve got a perfect avocado burning a hole in my pocket, so here we go with the main ingredients!

The last time I made a vintage avocado recipe, it was the 1946 ham, avocado, and donut Goblin Sandwich, and I came out somewhat the worse for wear. I cannot believe this will be edible, and I have my heart set on guac later, so I’m going to make 1/4 of the recipe by weighing the ingredients out by grams or reducing the volumes.

Math interlude! When reducing or increasing a recipe for a food that has a filling, remember that the 2D equations for surface area (for the crust or shell) and the 3D equations for volume (for the filling) do not change at the same rate. In short, the ratio of surface area to volume, or shell to filling, changes as you make the dish bigger or smaller. Here, I’m decreasing the recipe size, and I know that means I’ll have too much filling for my crust when I just divide by four, but that’s okay with me — it’ll give me a chance to try some of it before chilling fully. It’s much more important if you’re doubling a recipe, because you’ll need to increase the filling a lot more than the crust lest your potluck offerings suffer from Sad Pie Syndrome.

I kind of hate lime Jell-O, so I’m going with lemon. I have a fresh lemon for garnish, too, but the recipe calls for lime juice, and I agree that’s the best choice for avocado when it’s real, so I’m pulling out one of my favorite mock-tail secrets: crystallized lime juice. This particular product in the True Citrus line has no sweeteners, and that’s what I suggest using (not an ad! I just love it). A lil’ dab’ll do ya.

I’m also using pineapple that I froze from fresh. They were so beautiful at the store, and I made a delectable grilled pineapple salsa, but there was some left over for smoothies and such. Might as well use what I have on hand! What’s the worst thing that could happen?

Food science interlude! Have you struggled with getting your wiggly potluck offerings to gel properly? Beyond the usual issues like not dissolving thoroughly or letting it chill long enough, there are a few things that can doom your tropical bombe if you riff on a recipe too much: acids like vinegar and soda, alcohol, and fruits that contain a class of enzymes called proteases. These break down chemical bonds in protein, like the collagen in gelatin, and leave you with a soupy mess. The ones to watch out for? Guava, kiwi, papaya, mango, ginger, root, and pineapple, to name a few. (If you’d like a more thorough treatise on what’s going wrong with your gelatin attempts, there’s a great primer on Good Eats.)

Wait, isn’t pineapple in TONS of retro gelatin recipes? Yep. The way to get around this issue is to denature the enzyme by heating. Fruit that has been canned is ready to go, but if you’re using fresh as I am this time, just cook it a bit. The required temperature varies by enzyme, but if you want to avoid dragging out a thermometer to know when enough is enough, just heat to at least a simmer, and you’ll be good to go. I microwaved it for a couple of minutes and then shredded it with 2 forks like some kind of cursed enchilada filling.

Look at this innocent avocado quarter lying there. I feel so guilty. But, I mashed half of it and diced the other half as instructed, and then I tossed the cubes with the pineapple and lime juice hoping that might stave off browning the most (ugh). It helps a lot that there’s acid in the Jell-O and that it’ll be encased in an anoxic environment so that the polyphenol oxidase can’t work its evil magic turning delicious phenolic rings into icky quinones, but time will take its toll after slicing. Every little bit helps.

Hopefully you can see the stage of gelling that you want before mixing in the rest of the ingredients in the photos, because the “very thick” listed in the recipe isn’t very helpful, but what you’re looking for is a sort of jelly texture. Otherwise, either the fruit will sink, or there will be gelatin chunks dispersed in a candied guacamole matrix, and nobody wants that.

The filling that results is an awful baby-vomit green color. Just hideous. I tasted a bit and was not very happy.

My face when I tried guacamole Jell-O

But, a lot of flavors change when they have time to chill fully, and meld together. Maybe all is not lost. After a couple of hours in the fridge, it was solid, so I garnished it up and took a bite.

It’s actually not bad. There’s a lovely creamy mouthfeel from the dairy and avocado both. Most of the flavor is from the lemon, but there’s lime and pineapple, too, and the real fruit dampens the fake lemon flavor nicely, although I don’t think it would hide the lime Jell-O flavor as effectively. (It would also be an outrageously green color…I kind of regret my choices.) I can taste the avocado, but for the most part, it’s just an interesting, puzzling note and not unobtrusive — more on that in a minute. I cannot emphasize the importance of the graham crust enough. Without it, this would be a bowl of the

worst. pudding. ever.

But with it, it’s more like a key lime pie than anything else.

Now, this kind of presentation is for individual servings, because you can’t expect a pie in a tall-sided dish like this to come out in one piece, and it didn’t. But, I wanted to show you what it looks like when cut. Crushed pineapple means you’ll never get a clean slice, but it did hold up just fine even if a bit messy. This excavation also shows my main issue with this recipe:

The chunks.

I love avocado, but have you ever tried it plain? It’s weird. It has a vegetal flavor and oily mouthfeel. Adding lime, salt, and chiles elevates it to heights otherwise not available on this earth, and there is a dash of salt in this recipe, but the lime in the filling around the chunks doesn’t do enough to cut the weird. It would be better if you mashed all of it, no chunks.

But you know, it would be much, much better if you left out the avocado entirely.

So, I don’t know that I can in good conscience encourage you to make this Jell-O pie, but I can encourage you to make A Jell-O pie. You know, a different one. The possibilities are endless!

Well, almost endless. In addition to raw kiwi and too much vodka, there’s a long, long list of things that don’t belong in Jell-O. And there’s a recipe for every one of them.

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