FACTORALY - E68 JELLY

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

Jelly used to the the sole preserve of meats (well, along with salt, but that's another episode). Nowadays, apart from the occasional pate and pie, it's mostly used to make delicious trembley desserts. This episode goes deep into jelly and comes out a bit sticky Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi Simon. Hi Bruce, how are you today? I'm feeling a bit wobbly actually. Are you? Oh no, I'm feeling a little bit quivery as well no it's all good it's all good marvelous so welcome everybody to another edition of fact orally yes welcome this is a podcast hosted by me simon wells and me bruce fielding uh the two of us are professional voiceover artists as i'm sure you can tell yeah because we do that we do that. We do that. We do the things with the voices. And when we're not doing the things with the voices,

we use our voices anyway to bring these podcast episodes to you. We love facts. We are nerds. We love interesting historical random knowledge. Simon, you've just been to a pub quiz. I have, yes. We didn't win. But equally, we didn't win um but equally we didn't lose so that's the important thing that's good yes um yes we we're just absolute geeks we we're

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What are we actually going to be talking about this week, Bruce? Well, you see, it depends where you live. Yes, that's true. So can I first of all say we're not going to be talking about any boiled fruit with added sugar that turns into stuff that you put in a pot and pot and keep oh you mean jam i mean jam yes no we're not going to be talking about jam no no not about jam at all we are going to be talking about what the brits call jelly yes and the americans call jello yes so for the purposes of the following program when you hear the word jelly don't think about jam no don't apparently there is actually a the americans i didn't realize this do have both jelly and jam in the same way that we mean jam okay so generally speaking a smooth jam the

americans call jelly if they put fruit pulp in it then they're allowed to call it jam so you can have jam in america it's just not quite the same. So what do we call trifle? Oh, who knows? So what is jelly, Bruce? If you were to describe jelly to a person who's unfamiliar with the concept, how would you describe it? It's delicious. It's absolutely yummy. I always have three or four packets of jelly lying around in the kitchen

because i i think it's a great thing to have as a little snack or a treat yes and it's i mean okay it's a lot of sugar and it's not vegetarian sure but but it is delicious yes it is and it's so it's sort of like a transparent wobbly dessert. Yes. Oh, it's not always transparent. I mean, if you have like a blancmange, which is a type of jelly. Oh, I was going to query the difference. Does blancmange use milk rather than water?

Is that correct? Yes. So blancmange still uses gelatin, which is the main constituent of the thing that makes jelly go wobbly. But it uses milk instead of water. Although, you can also, there's a third thing you can use in jelly, which is tonic water. Oh, really? If you use tonic water in,

you don't have to use a whole lot of tonic water, but when you fill up the second half pint in the jelly, if you use tonic water and you happen to go into a disco, then your jelly will glow in the dark. No way. Yeah. Really? It's quite good for birthdays and celebrations and obviously things like Halloween. But yeah, so quinine has that property where it glows under black light.

Yes. So if you use tonic water, you get glow-in-the-dark jelly. That's brilliant. I'll try that now. There you go. There's a recipe for you immediately on Factorally. Perfect. So where does jelly come from? So historically, it's been suggested that jelly started in the Middle East. Egyptians or Romans?

It's always one or the other, isn't it? I couldn't find the definitive answer. The Egyptians were eating it, but they didn't necessarily invent it. Right, okay. But Middle East, a couple of thousand years ago at least. Originally, it was made by sort of boiling down pig' ears or cow's trotters or whatever, because the gelatin you mentioned is sort of a form of collagen that exists in animals. Yes.

And it was just that. It was just boiled down pigs' ears or trotters or whatever. The liquid was strained and sieved to make clear, and it was set. It could just be eaten as that and it was sort of a savory right a little while later they started putting flavors in it they started putting saffron pressed violets and even um cochineal which are those little beetles that i think they used to make colored dye back i think it's knee number oh is it okay great um so it's rather old uh it's sort of gone on a bit of a journey from that to where we know it today the etymology of the word jelly comes

from an old french word jelly which comes from latin gelata which means frozen or frosty which is that like gelato gelato exactly gelatin exactly. Gelatinous gelatin itself. It all comes from that sort of frozen solid idea. It was originally, one of the many uses of jelly still is to preserve meat. Oh, I see. Because, for example, if you have a pork pie or something like that, the meat inside the pork pie shrinks. Yes. So you need to fill up the gaps because meat goes off in oxygen. So what you need to do is get rid of any of the gaps in the pie.

Oh, I see. To seal it. To seal it. Exactly. So you're sealing it. And also, if you're using a jelly which is flavoured, A, it's flavoured of itself, and B, it picks up the flavours of the meat inside the pie, and C, it keeps the pie crust moist.

So there's all sorts of good reasons to have jelly in a pie, as a preservative, as a flavour enhancer, and as something to keep the crust soft. I'd never even thought about talking about the pork pie type jelly, but yes, of course it is. So putting jelly into a meat pie has been going on for a very long time. I mean, since sort of 17th century. Really? Yeah. Oh, okay.

And of course, you know, there are all sorts of other meats that use jelly. For example, jelly deals. Oh, of course, yes. So that's a different sort of jelly because the jelly actually comes out of the eel in that case. Oh, does it? You don't have to add the jelly. Oh, interesting. Do you like jelly deals?

Never tried it. A bit of vinegar. Mmm, yummy. Never quite taken my fancy. I will take you to a pie and mash shop and get you some jelly deals. Excellent. I'll go to it. Jellies were very big in Victorianorian times even before that georgian times

even before that henry viii uh liked a jelly he produced a banquet in 1517 for the embassy of spain who was visiting him in england and he served no fewer than 20 different jellies including his favorite which was flavored with rose water apparently and um you can sort of picture the candles on the banqueting table shining through the jelly and casting all these wibbly wobbly colorful shapes on the on the tablecloth and uh there's a there's sort of a certain theatrical nature to it you can picture this servant sort of gingerly carefully tiptoeing across this across the hall with this jelly i'm sort of picturing that sound effect that jelly often gets in cartoons like the

the wobble board yes sound so it was a whole process it was quite a spectacle um and then in the georgian era i hadn't heard of this this is brand new information to me dotted around london particularly in the fashionable areas of st james and Belgrave, places like that, they had jelly houses. No. You could actually go to a jelly house and it was sort of the Georgian equivalent of a cocktail bar. You went to coffee or maybe a jelly? Let's go for a jelly. I mean, you get alcoholic jelly shots now, don't you? Yes, you do. That's true.

So it's not too much of a step from that um you know they're always for the the wealthy you know it took ages to skim that liquid to make it clear the ingredients you know it involved a lot of sugar and exotic herbs and spices and things like that it was very much an upper class treat and it was sort of the centerpiece of the table very expensive very expensive yeah making a jelly that way you know Very expensive, yeah. Making a jelly that way, you know, where you boil it all down, it's very tricky. Yeah. Because you've got to get the gelatin. Yeah.

But in 1839, there was a chap called George Nelson. Right. Who patented a way of getting gelatin using chemicals. Oh, right. Okay. And that revolutionized the whole jelly chemicals. Oh, right. Okay. And that revolutionized the whole jelly industry. Oh, right. And so in 1839, that started. So that meant that at the beginning of the Victorian era,

jellies were much easier to make. You've got like a sheet of gelatin. Yeah. And then, obviously, they're Victorian, so they went nuts. So they started to make these amazing copper molds in all sorts of weird shapes of like animals and floral tributes and and and castles and towers and yes i've seen one which is like a jelly with molds that you put inside the jelly so that you get like you can put different colored jelly within the jellies i've seen this this had a particular name um this was called the belgrave jelly yes it was created by a company

called temple and reynolds in belgravia in london and it was sort of a it was an outer copper mold with six spiraled that's the one molds inside it and they each sort of screwed together and unscrewed again yeah and then you could pipe sort of um colored flavored sweet creams into the gap where between those those molds yes um we'll put a i found a little video of one of these things having been made wobbling around and you can see all the different colors and shapes and textures uh we'll put a link to that video up onto the show notes on factorily.com. Factorily.com. That's the one. And then you can sit and watch this wobbling jelly to your heart's content.

So that one was called the Belgrave. There was another one that was created in 1863 for the wedding of Prince Edward and Princess Alexandra. And it had the emblems of the star and garter and the Brunswick cross running through this jelly, sort of like the words running through a stick of rock. Wow. And it was just this ridiculously flamboyant, not particularly big, because jelly is rather the victim of gravity. You can't make a terribly tall, impressive sized jelly.

No, quite. So you sort of have to make it with the detail and the structure and the shape and uh that sort of thing brilliant they'd invented the victorians had invented the the high-powered press so you got you got like sheets of copper you heated them up and then you press them into all sorts of fairly intricate shapes. Yes. You could also make them out of ceramics. Oh, really?

So there are ceramic jelly molds as well. Oh, okay. And they're quite good because they retain heat and also retain cold. Yeah. So they're quite useful. I can just sort of picture a thousand National Trust houses that I've visited over the years. Any historic property worth its salt, if you go down into the servants' quarters and the kitchens, just sort of picture a thousand national trust houses that i've visited over the years any any historic property worth its salt if you go down into the the servants quarters in the kitchens

they've got a huge array of these copper and ceramic jelly molds on the shelves yeah no it's fantastic it's really good so so that that's the old-fashioned way of making jelly. And then the Americans got involved. Thanks, guys. Yeah, back in sort of 1897. So Victoria's still alive at this point. Yes, yes. A chap called Pearl Waite.

Isn't that a great name? I know, Pearl B. Waite. He was a carpenter and and he was trying to create a laxative tea as you do and and he's making patent medicines like cough syrups right and these laxatives and things and and he made this gelatin dessert and his wife decided to call it jello ah with a hyphen uh yes gel hyphen o yes and and um so his wife is called may and she is the one who said i'll tell you what this needs needs a bit of a bit of flavor different flavors yeah so she came up with four flavors she came up with strawberry raspberry orange and lemon right yeah quite recognizable modern jelly flavors

yeah yeah i mean they're very classic uh now jello has 22 different flavors good grief does it yeah including strawberry banana melon fusion and tropical fusion crikey ikey. I know. Wow. So Jell-O is, it's sort of one of those stereotypical things, isn't it? That we and America have different opinions as to what to call a thing. Yes. So it's a trade name, isn't it? Yes. So Jell-O is a trade name, whereas jelly is generic. But it's become so ubiquitous that the stuff as a whole is now referred to as jello like i'm gonna blow my nose on a kleenex or i'm exactly hoover the carpet or whatever use a biro yes exactly that sort of thing so jello was invented in just before the turn of the uh 19th to 20th centuries. And then in the 1930s, round trees decided to have a crack at it.

Yes. And round trees started to make jellies, which were the sort of jelly that you see. Actually, I think they were originally packets of like a powder. Yes, okay. And then they became what we in the uk use which which is mostly um like squares of concentrated uh jelly yes it's sort of it's it is just like a very strong very

small highly flavored jelly you plop it into a bowl you put boiling water in it and 30 seconds later you've got the stuff that you need to make a jelly yes although if you're a young kid like me you you just eat the cubes i remember doing that to my mother's chagrin quite quite a lot so i believe we briefly mentioned round trees in our episode on confection because you surprised me by telling me that round trees used to make chocolates yes before they sort of went into pastels and things and i'd sort of forgotten that they did jelly as well but but of course they do well if you think about it round trees pastels are actually jelly yes so that's what that's where i was going was the fact that i hadn't really twigged this but another definition of the word jelly is a small jellied sweet so you know you think of jellied fruits at christmas you

think of oh yes pastels and wine gums and and things like that the collective generic term for all of those things is jellies yes of course it is um which i hadn't really thought of but of course round trees do that and have been doing it for for quite some time. I mean, there is a jelly which isn't a jelly, which is a jelly bean. Right. Yes. But if we take that new definition of a jelly, meaning a small jelly-like, chewy-ish sweet, then I can kind of see how jelly beans would fit into that. Yes.

Just about. Let's not talk about it. We did a whole episode on confectionery. Yes. Which people should look up. We'll gloss over that. Yeah. I mean, there's also things in there like jelly babies.

Yes. Which we have definitely covered before. Which we have covered before. And the sad names that they've had over the years. Oh, please go and listen to our episode on confectionery. That was a good one. Yeah, it was excellent. I mean, they're all good.

They're all good. Of course they are. And then alongside Round Trees came Hartleys. Yes. And I was struggling to remember the name of who the main sort of jelly, there you go, give it a rustle against the, listen to that. Bruce is now playing with a packet of hartley's instant jelly i am um and hartley's uh was started in the liverpool area in 1871 by uh william pickles hartley not jr no not wp um and he started making jam jam in the UK sense of the word.

And then in 1874, he started doing marmalades and jelly. Right. And Hartley's, to my mind, that is the only viable brand of instant jelly now. You can even buy it in little pots. Yes. Ready-made. Yeah, ready-made as a single one-off seems like a cheat to me it does it depends how much time you've got spare in your life i suppose yeah i do remember though for christmas you know for

children's parties and things like that used to get these i don't know if you can still get them it's like wax paper individual portion servings all right and you would pour the jelly into the and they were like crimped around the side. I actually, I vaguely remember looking quite recently to see if I could find any to buy and they don't make them anymore. Oh, don't they? Oh, shame. I mean, they were great for throwing at people. I'm sure that's exactly what they made them for. So although Hartleys started off in Liverpool, they had a processing plant in Bermondsey in South East London. And the tower is still there. If you go for a walk around Bermondsey off one of the side streets, there's a great big huge brick chimney from the old Hartley's jelly and jam factory.

All right. Hartley's written on it. Very good. It's now surrounded by modern flats but there you go Hartley was one of those sort of Victorian gentlemen who was a bit of a philanthropist so he looked after his staff well he gave

30 odd percent of his income to charity he created almshouses, schools, hospitals, churches for his workers and everyone sort of lived in a slightly cabri-esque yes manner great um he was one of those fellows uh all based on jam and jelly well there you go you've probably seen jelly on screen quite a lot okay i mean you may not have done but i bet you

have and if you haven't seen it you've've heard it. I know you've heard it. Okay. So it's mostly American, so it's mostly Jell-O that was used, but we'll call it jelly. So in 1923, there was a silent film called The Ten Commandments. Hmm. And they used jelly as a special effect for the parting of the sea. Did they really? i don't know if i'll be

able to find it but i'll have a look to see i mean in in in the later version that the charlton heston one i'm sure they used proper special effects yes in the 1923 silent they definitely used jello in in that that's brilliant um coming more up to date et uh the extraterrestrial yes um the the sound of the extraterrestrial was actually made by somebody squishing jelly in a shirt really yeah how very bizarre oh wizard of oz wizard of oz brilliant you know in the wizard of oz there's um a carriage which is pulled by a horse which is the horse of a different color yes so what they did is they got four horses but the um american um aspca said you can't dye the horse you can't get white horses and just dye them that would be

cruel sure so what they use they use jelly they just made they had four white horses and they just smeared them with jelly to make them different colours. Oh my goodness. That's brilliant. And then they had to keep the horses away from each other because they would lick it off each other. Yeah, so they were tinted with lemon, cherry and grape to get that spectrum going. Brilliant. And it worked really well. I thought I'll put a link

to that portion of the film so you can see the horse changing color and then when you know that it's covered in jelly it makes it makes it even more nice you can picture the smell of the horse yeah exactly there was also a film in 1958 called the blob oh i remember that oh you were alive well i wasn't alive I remember it retrospectively. Yeah, so there's a film called The Blob, which is like this American teen shock horror film. Yeah. And in The Blob, there was a blob of something jelly-like

which was attached to somebody's hand, and it grew to this enormous, great blob that was, like, taking over cities. Yes. And that was jelly. That was made of jelly. Absolutely. Of course it was. I can was made of jelly. Absolutely.

Of course it was. I can totally picture that now, yes. So jelly was once also called nervous pudding. Okay. Right. Because it shakes and shimmers. Yes, okay. It looks a bit nervous.

There's actually a jazz band called Nervous Pudding, which you can look up on Spotify. But what's interesting about Nervous Pudding is that if you put EEGs on a jelly, you get the same reading as you do from a brain. No, you don't. Yes, you do. So there's an experiment,

which I'll put a link in the show notes to the video of this woman doing it. So she does an EEG of her own brain. And then she's got a bowl of jelly. And she puts the same electrodes on the jelly and exposes it to things like sound and light and cutting it. And it reacts as though it's a brain. I don't know what to make of that, Bruce. Are you telling me that jelly feels pain when you take a scoop out of it? Jelly is sentient.

That's just... Oh, I'm not happy with that. Is that weird? It's so weird. That's very weird. Speaking of nervous pudding, that's an interesting segue I wasn't expecting. There was a theory many hundreds of years ago that because as you boil down meat to get gelatin,

an ancient theory was that under extreme emotion, people might literally be reduced to jelly in the same kind of way. I mean, it is an expression. Yeah, exactly. So you get the idea of being nervous as a jelly or shaking like a jelly, etc. In Shakespeare's play

Hamlet, one of the characters says, after seeing the king's ghost, that the watchmen were almost reduced to jelly with fear. Okay, now you've got to do it like a voiceover. It has distilled the watchmen almost to jelly with the act of fear yeah you can tell we're voiceovers right there you go uh so yeah nervous as a jelly well well i never

you mentioned at the front there may be records attached to to jellies yes rather loosely because otherwise they'll you know just fall off um there are there are some great you know i went into this um fully expecting to see what i found this is this is great the world's largest jelly essentially that's that's kind of where i wanted to start as mentioned earlier jellies don't get very tall because they're quite splatty and gravity is not their friend yes but in 1997 the world's largest jelly was built well was made at blackpool pleasure beach and it was a whopping three foot tall is that it but it was 23 feet wide okay that's quite significant so it was quite big um the army logistics corps used dry ice machines to set the jelly that's how big it was uh in 1981

uh there was a a company an australian swimming pool installation company called pool fab they yeah they didn't they didn't they didn't fill in in tires they created the world's largest jelly swimming pool uh that would be such fun to swim in wouldn't it they built a purpose-built pool and they filled it with 35 000 liters or 7 700 gallons of pink watermelon-flavoured jelly. Wow! Just for funsies. The most jelly eaten, blindfolded, with no hands, within one minute. 1,445 grams, just under one and a half kilos.

Wow. This was achieved by a German fellow called André Autolf in 2016. Is that face first? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no hands behind your back, face down, gobble. Just under one and a half kilos of jelly in one minute. And this fellow, André Autolf, also holds the record for the most jelly eaten with chopsticks in one minute. Ah.

And compared to the using your mouth, hands the chopstick thing is is quite disappointing but still 716 grams of jelly he ate with a pair of chopsticks in one minute i guess it depends on how set the jelly i mean if you if you make the jelly very and if you if you only make it like sort of half strength yeah or double strength whichever you look at it if you use like rather than making it up to a pint yes one of my my packets if you only made it up to half a pint so it was really still quite gelatinous yeah then i imagine you could eat it with i mean you could eat you could eat you know packets and packets of hartley's jelly cubes yes with chopsticks i wonder if that would count i don't think i think you'd have to make it up at least with some water.

Yeah. Yeah. And then finally, the last thing I found was the world's biggest jelly art. I think the word art is a bit of a stretch, but I liked it anyway, so I'm going to include it. In 2012, the Brunel ship SS Great Britain, which is docked in Bristol, was surrounded by a pool of bright green jelly. How? So the SS Great Britain, it sort of sits on a glass floor. Yes.

They built some little surroundings around the glass floor, filled it with jelly. And it looks like the SS Great Britain is floating on a bright green sea. And apparently the artists were inspired by the fact that sailors used to carry limes on voyages to ward off scurvy. Limeys. Limeys, exactly, yeah. So these artists are a pair called Bompus and Parr, who call themselves the Jellymongers. And they do lots of jelly-related art.

In 2016, they set up a jelly parlour in Harrods in London. And they had all of these jellies, replicas of St Paul's Cathedral, a sort of cocktail glass made out of jelly. They've done climbing walls made out of chocolate. They're fascinating people. I'll put a link to their website up on factually.com because they're fascinating.

I'd look forward to seeing them. So yes, those are my uh my jelly related records fantastic well i think that's all i have to say on the matter of jelly yes i think i've uh run out of jelly related facts so thank you very much for listening yes thank you very much for coming along to another fun-filled episode of Fact or Really. Bye-bye. Au revoir.