Chiffon Marble circa 1974

It’s just as well that Chiffon Marble is a reboot, because I honestly have no recollection of having made it, ever. That’s not surprising, because it’s one of the simpler recipes in the book, in the “Nice Easy Things to Do with Jell-O” chapter.

The timing on this wasn’t great. I made it last weekend, while spontaneous protests were springing up in airports around the country in response to the executive order banning people from seven Middle Eastern and north African countries from traveling to the U.S. I was with them in spirit, after having spent the latter part of the week lending a sympathetic ear to the foreign nationals in the lab (including one individual from one of the named countries) who are anxious about the order, and increasingly disappointed in the U.S. It’s touching to know that they share our ideals and that they see this country as a source of inspiration as well as opportunity, which makes it that much harder to see how we’re letting them down.

Yes, this is really all there is to it

So it would have been nice to get stuck into one of the more elaborate Jell-O creations, something to take my mind off of things for a little while. Instead, what popped up on the editorial calendar was Chiffon Marble, which contains a grand total of four ingredients – and that’s including boiling water and ice cubes. Still, it felt good to crank up my Galaxy News Radio station on Pandora (which I couldn’t access in London) and do a little “cooking”.

One mildly interesting thing is that this recipe calls for the Jell-O to be quick-thickened with ice cubes, so I went ahead and did that, and it worked – so I guess the kitchen was just chilly enough. (Great.) After the Jell-O was thickened, I set aside 3/4 of a cup of it and folded about a cup (half of a prepared envelope) of Dream Whip into the remainder. The idea, then, was that the bavarian part and the plain Jell-O part should be layered and then swirled around a bit with a knife to a achieve a marbled effect. It sounds fine in theory, but it turned out that the plain Jell-O was denser than the bavarian part, so it just sank into the middle of the bavarian. Swirling didn’t seem to help much. Clearly there was some sort of trickery involved in the photo from the book, because this is how mine turned out:

Chiffon Marble á la Freak Mountain

On the plus side, there was leftover Dream Whip for garnish, and lime is one of the nicer flavors of Jell-O, so it wasn’t hard to eat it all.

I have to say, too, that making Jell-O is not such a terrible coping strategy…