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Birdshot + jello. Image courtesy of Flickr user nebarnix.

Our concept of Jell-O-centric criminality typically doesn’t go beyond the idea of ill-conceived potluck salads with fruits or vegetables suspended in the death grip of technicolor molded gelatin. (We all smile and politely eat them anyway.) But while researching a recent post on Jell-O, I came across several instances of the jiggly dessert being at the root of some nefarious activity. I’ve enjoyed food and true crime stories—involving files baked into cakes and ice cream men—so much that the following stories were impossible to pass up. Although this is hardly how Jell-O manufacturers want their product to be remembered. “It is not a usage that we promote for Jell-O,” a General Foods spokeswoman said about Jell-O during the Martin Eisen trial (detailed below), “and, as with any product, it has to be used responsibly, and that is the responsibility of the consumer.” From drunk driving to acts of Cold War espionage, here’s a look at how Jell-O has sprung up in our criminal justice system.

New York City, New York. July, 1950. Jell-O and spy rings.

Husband and wife Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were brought to trial in one of the most famous and controversial Cold War-era court cases. They were accused of securing top-secret information about the atomic bomb for the Soviet Union—and a Jell-O box played a role in their conviction. The Rosenbergs orchestrated a meeting between Harry Gold, a New York chemist who was also part of the Rosenbergs’ spy network, and David Greenglass, Ethel’s brother who had worked on the Manhattan Project and had top-secret information on the atom bomb. So that the pair could covertly signal to each other that they were a part of the same spy ring, a Jell-O box was cut up, half of it given to Gold, the other half given to Greenglass. When the two met up, the matching box piece was an “all clear” sign for Greenberg to pass on his bomb information, which eventually made its way back to the Soviet Union. Although the original Jell-O box was never found, a facsimile (a box of raspberry-flavored gelatin, now in the National Archives) was used in the trial to link the Rosenbergs to the atomic information leak. Greenglass got 15 years in prison in exchange for his testimony against the Rosenbergs while Harry Gold was sentenced to 30 years. Julius and Ethel were convicted on espionage charges and sentenced to death, and both went to the electric chair on June 19, 1953. Whether the punishment suited the couple’s activities later became a hot debate topic. In 2008, Morton Sobell, who was charged with espionage along with the Rosenbergs but had always maintained his innocence, confirmed that he and Julius were indeed active Soviet agents.

Westport, Massachusetts. January, 1990. Death by Jell-O

Richard Alfredo died at age 61 from a massive heart attack, and because he suffered from chronic heart ailments, his mortal end did not come as a surprise. However, police suspected that he did not die from natural causes and an autopsy revealed that he had massive amounts of the hallucinogenic drug LSD in his system. Attention turned to his 39-year-old live-in girlfriend Christina Martin, who moved to Montreal a month after her boyfriend’s passing, and she was put on trial for murder. Witness testimony revealed that Alfredo suffered the heart attack after Martin, thinking she could inherit her boyfriend’s money and property, served him a lime Jell-O dessert that was laced with a lethal dose of LSD. Martin was convicted of the crime in 1992 and sentenced to life in prison.

Los Angeles, California. November, 1992. The Jell-O Defense.

On the evening of November 11, 1992, Martin Barry Eisen was pulled over by police for driving 55 m.p.h. in a 35 m.p.h. zone, and at the time of his arrest, he had a blood alcohol content of .10. At trial, Eisen testified that some 25 minutes before getting behind the wheel, he enjoyed several bowls of cherry Jell-O that, unbeknownst to him, his friend had spiked with vodka. The court failed to sympathize with that line of defense. Eisen was fined $1,053 and ordered to attend 3 months of alcohol education classes.

Durham, New Hampshire. February, 1992. There’s always room for free speech.

University of New Hampshire English professor J. Donald Silva was giving a lecture to his technical writing class and his description of belly dancer Little Egypt’s skills landed the 59-year-old tenured teacher in hot water. “Belly dancing,” he said, “is like Jell-O on a plate, with a vibrator under the plate.” Nine students complained and the university suspended Silva on sexual harassment grounds. Silva later filed suit and in 1994, Federal District Courts ruled that the university violated his first amendment rights and that there were legitimate, pedagogical reasons for his language choices. Silva was reinstated, but the court decision did not address the $42,000 in damages or back pay he had sought.

East Northport, New York. March, 2010. The proof is in the pudding. (Or lack thereof.)

Something was definitely amiss when a Long Island supermarket customer bought a box of Jell-O pudding only to find that it was filled with sand and salt. Police were able to trace the suspicious box back to a Long Island couple, 68-year-old Alexander Clements and his wife of 40 years, Christine, age 64. The couple had a penchant for pistachio and butterscotch pudding and, hitting up four area stores, would buy up to 10 boxes of pudding, take them home to empty their contents and replace the powdered pudding mix with plastic bags full of salt and sand and return the resealed boxes to the store to get a refund. Per the authorities, Christine was suffering from age-related mental issues and the couple did not intend to harm other people—but rather just wanted pudding without paying for it in spite of being financially stable. The couple was arrested and charged with petit larceny and tampering with a consumer product.

Salisbury steak TV dinner. Image courtesy of Flickr user kewagi

I can picture it now: two oblong ground beef patties taking a gravy bath, neatly sequestered in their aluminum compartment to prevent the sauce from bleeding onto the tater tots, pea-and-carrot medley or, most importantly, the apple dessert. A meal for a Hungry Man—or a child of the 1970s with an unsophisticated palate. (I considered TV dinners a treat when I was a kid, especially the ones with built-in dessert.)

The phrase “Salisbury steak” no longer sets off my salivary glands—quite the opposite—but it’s a lot more appetizing than how Dr. James Henry Salisbury described the dish before it was named after him: “muscle pulp of beef.”

And that may be the least nauseating bit in his scatalogically dense 1888 book, The Relation of Alimentation and Disease. Dr. Salisbury, like many people before and since, believed that food was the key to health and that certain foods could cure illness, especially of the intestinal variety. He tested his theories during the Civil War, treating chronic diarrhea among Union soldiers with a diet of chopped-up meat and little else. After 30 years of research he finally published his ideas, setting off one of the earliest American fad diets.

“Healthy alimentation, or feeding upon such foods as the system can well digest and assimilate, is always promotive of good health. Unhealthy alimentation always acts as a cause of disease,” he wrote. Most modern physicians would agree with the sentiment to at least some degree, if not as to what constitutes healthy or unhealthy alimentation (more commonly known as “food” nowadays).

For Salisbury, minced beef patties were health food. The enemies, believe it or not, were fresh fruit and vegetables. When overconsumed “at the expense of more substantial aliments,” he wrote, these led to “summer complaints” in children.

As for the ill soldiers, the problem was an “amylaceous [starchy], army biscuit diet,” with not enough variety or nutrients. His prescription:

The first step is to wash out the sour stomach and bowels [by drinking hot water], and to change the food. The food selected should be such as is least liable to ferment with alcohol and acid yeasts. This is muscle pulp of beef, prepared as heretofore described, when it affords the maximum of nourishment with the minimum of effort to the digestive organs. Nothing else but this food, except an occasional change to broiled mutton.

In the preface, Salisbury described the research that led him to his conclusion:

In 1854 the idea came to me, in one of my solitary hours, to try the effects of living exclusively upon one food at a time. This experiment I began upon myself alone at first…. I opened this line of experiments with baked beans. I had not lived upon this food over three days before light began to break. I became very flatulent and constipated, head dizzy, ears ringing, limbs prickly, and was wholly unfitted for mental work. The microscopic examination of passages showed that the bean food did not digest.

Did the intrepid scientist stop there? Of course not! In 1858 he enlisted six other schlemiels to come live with him and eat nothing but baked beans. He did not mention whether he had a wife who had to put up with seven flatulent, dizzy mopes in her home; my guess is no. Later he and four other guys subsisted solely on oatmeal porridge for 30 days. Other single-food experiments followed, leading him to the conclusion that lean beef, minced to break down any connective tissue and fully cooked, was the best and most easily digested food. By the time the Civil War started, in 1861, he was ready to test his theories on suffering soldiers.

When Salisbury’s book was published, two decades after the end of the war, his ideas caused a sensation. An Englishwoman named Elma Stuart extolled the healing virtues of the Salisbury diet in a book described by one observer as being “written in a popular and racy style,” helping to publicize the mincemeat regimen. For about two decades the diet—not that different, when you think of it, from extreme versions of the low-carb diets of recent years—was all the rage.

Not for another half-century would the Salisbury steak’s future TV dinner companions, tater tots, be invented. By then, Salisbury had been dead for almost 50 years, too late to object to such “unhealthy alimentation.”

A colorful cheese curd, courtesy of Flickr user Jer Kunz

Shortly after I moved to the Adirondack Park, a little south of the Quebec border, I noticed a sign outside a roadside food stand advertising “cheese curds.” This struck me as weird at the time. I knew cottage cheese was made up of curds and whey, the stuff Little Miss Muffet ate, but that didn’t sound like a very appetizing accompaniment to hot dogs and fries.

I soon learned that these were a different sort of curd—irregularly shaped lumps of fresh cheddar that hadn’t been pressed and aged. They are a popular treat among French-Canadians and a major component of poutine, a concoction of fries, gravy and curds. Some people eat the curds plain or deep fried (as they were at the roadside stand). They melt exceptionally well, so they’re also used anywhere aged cheddar might go, like in macaroni and cheese.

Curds have another distinguishing feature: they squeak when you bite into them. Some people even call curds “squeaky cheese.” The fresher they are, the louder the squeal. At their freshest it may sound like you’re making balloon animals in your mouth, or that a tiny window-washer is squeegeeing your teeth. Alas, the effect is fleeting; within a few days of production the curds lose their musicality. So the only way to experience the phenomenon is to go somewhere where cheese is produced, or to make it yourself.

Native Wisconsinite Louisa Kamps explained in the New York Times a few years ago that the squeak comes from the fact that the binding proteins in the cheese are still “superelastic, like new rubberbands.” She describes the sound as like “two balloons trying to neck.”

Wisconsin, as the number-one cheese producer in the United States, is also the nation’s undisputed cheese curd capital. But as the third-biggest cheese-making state and the neighbor of fromage blanc–loving Quebec (like most things, cheese curds sound nicer in French), New York has its fair share of curds. Last weekend I bought some from a local farmer’s market; the Argyle Cheese Farmer had both plain and flavored varieties. I got plain and basil-garlic. Although they were only a couple of days old they had already lost their squeak, but they were still delicious—like mild cheddar, with a texture that reminded me of stringless string cheese (a little springy). Curds can also be made from other kinds of cheese; or rather, all kinds of cheese can be eaten at the curd stage.

If you can get your hands on some curds, try them beer-battered and fried, sprinkled in salad, in the place of anywhere you’d use another melted cheese or, of course, in poutine. And if you can’t find fresh curds, you could always make them yourself.

A restaurant's refrigerator is the perfect place to spend some private time. Courtesy of Flickr user jczart

For this month’s Inviting Writing series, we asked you to share your best, worst or funniest dining-out experiences, from the perspective of either the served or the server. Our first essay reveals just how educational a job in food service can be.

Dana Bate is a writer living in Washington, D.C. She has produced, reported or written for PBS, Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and others. You can learn more about her at danabate.com.

What About Bob?
By Dana Bate

I should have known there was something odd about Bob from the start. When I met him in the summer of 2003, I was fresh out of college and looking for a part-time waitressing gig. Bob managed a small, upscale restaurant in suburban Philadelphia, and he agreed to meet with me on a hot and muggy June afternoon. I had never interviewed for a position as a waitress before. I didn’t know what to expect.

When I walked into the air-conditioned chill of the restaurant, the room lit only by a sliver of light from the glass block windows, Bob emerged from the back. His skin appeared almost translucent against his thick eyebrows and jet-black hair, and his eyes sunk deep into his skull. He looked a bit like a poor man’s Jonathan Rhys Meyers in vampire form—and I mean that in the worst way possible. Why I didn’t immediately head for the door I will never know.

Bob sat me down, and after chatting for a few minutes about my waitressing credentials (or, rather, my complete lack thereof) he offered me the job. Then he proceeded to extol, in a very animated fashion, the virtues of a macrobiotic diet—as one does when hiring a woman to bus plates and memorize daily specials.

Although I had recently graduated from an Ivy League school and prided myself on my book smarts, I lacked street smarts, and so none of Bob’s quirks raised any red flags. Maybe all restaurant managers dressed in black from head to toe and wore silver and onyx rings the size of Cerignola olives. Maybe all restaurant managers offered prospective employees a copy of An Instance of the Fingerpost. What did I know?

Bob promised to show me the ropes, and as the weeks passed, I picked up tips I surely wouldn’t have gathered on my own. For example, when a couple is on a romantic date, it’s a good idea for the manager to pull a chair up to their table and talk to them for a solid twenty minutes. The couple will love it—or so Bob assured me.

Also, disappearing in the basement to “check on the walk-in” every half hour is totally normal – nay, expected. I had so much to learn.

A month or two into my waitressing stint, a new waitress named Beth joined the team. She had fiery red hair and had waitressed for many years at another restaurant down the street. Beth took grief from no one. To her, my naiveté must have been painful.

One night, as we rushed to flip the tables for our next set of reservations, Beth looked up at me.

“Where the hell is Bob?” she asked.

“He’s checking on the walk-in.” I paused. “He kind of does that a lot.”

Beth chuckled. “Yeah, and I’m sure he comes back with a lot more energy, right?”

Come to think of it, Bob did always come back with a little more lift in his step after his trips to the basement. I knew he smoked a pack of cigarettes a day. Maybe it was a nicotine high?

Beth cackled at my ignorance. She tapped on her nose with the tip of her finger and sniffed loudly. “I think we’re dealing with a different chemical here.”

Wait—Bob did cocaine? Could this be true? I considered it. A drug addiction would explain his chattiness with customers and his frequent disappearances. It would also probably explain why I came in one Monday to find that Bob, on a whim, had spent the previous day buffing the copper siding of the bar, alone, just for fun.

As I let this information sink in, Bob emerged from the basement, his lips and nose caked in white powder. My eyes widened. It was true: Bob was doing drugs.

I realized then how naïve I was—how college had broadened my horizons intellectually but had done little to prepare me for the realities of life outside the ivory tower. Sure, I had friends who’d dabbled in illegal substances here and there, but I’d never known an addict. For me, those people existed only in movies and books and after-school specials. But this wasn’t some juicy story in Kitchen Confidential. Bob was real, and so were his problems. I had even more to learn than I thought.

Beth smirked and shook her head as she watched my innocence melt away before her eyes.

“Welcome to the real world, honey,” she said. “It’s one hell of a ride.”

Image courtesy of Algonquin books.

Family meal planning stereotypically falls on the shoulders of women; however an increasing number of men are working in the kitchen. In 1965, dad helmed the stove only about 5 percent of the time. By 2005, at least according to statistics presented in the book Changing Rhythms of American Family Life, that figure had grown substantially: the paternal unit was responsible for a third of a family’s time spent cooking. (Some sources point to the increasing number of women in the out-of-home workforce, others see that having cooking know-how is a means of making a man more attractive to a potential romantic interest.) And with websites such as Man Tested Recipes and television programming like “Top Chef” that put a highly competitive spin on cooking, our 21st century culture is encouraging men to dispense with old gender roles and crack out the pots and pans. If the father figure in your life is already master of the kitchen—or if you’re trying to encourage one to expand his cooking abilities beyond the occasional bit of grilling—here are a few Father’s Day book ideas that we hope will get his creative gears turning.

Man With a Pan: New Yorker editor John Donahoe offers this collection of essays—and yes, a few recipes—in which notable personalities from author Stephen King to chef Mario Batali open up about their foibles and triumphs in the kitchen. If nothing else, it reinforces the idea that learning how to make meals for loved ones is a wonderful way to provide for one’s family. Donahoe caught the cooking bug after he and his wife had their first child and he realized that, if he was going to have satisfying dining experiences, he was better off making meals at home than dining out. “Night after night,” Donohue says in his introduction, “when I whipped up something delicious that pleased Sarah and fed Aurora and Isis, I felt like I was doing something so right that I couldn’t possibly go wrong.” For those of you looking to go beyond the book, Donahoe tracks his culinary escapades by way of his blog.

Hunt, Gather, Cook: Journalist, former restaurant cook and author Hank Shaw takes a very “back to basics” approach to securing food. “Most have forgotten the feast that lives all around us,” he says. “Our hunting and gathering is now largely restricted to picking through the produce aisle for the best ear of corn or keeping an eagle’s eye out for so-called bargains. But our instincts are strong. We’ve been hunters and gatherers eons longer than we’ve been farmers.” And with that said, he teaches you how to forage, fish and hunt—and how to use your wild ingredients. Acorns are no longer the bane of leaf raking, with Shaw proving them suitable for soups and bread making. Learn to make wines from dandelion and elderberry and how to spot foodstuffs you might not have thought to be useful in the kitchen, such as day lilies, nettles and amaranth.

Eat Like a Man: The Only Cookbook a Man Will Ever Need: OK, so the title is marinating in machismo. But the book is by Esquire food editor Ryan D’Agostino, so I wouldn’t expect anything less than this manner of tongue-in-cheek humor. This one is for the beginner chef, with a section telling you what tools you need in your toolbox, er, cupboards and no-frills pointers on how to entertain like a mature, civilized adult. Which is important because, as D’Agostino notes: “The dinner party is one of the last places in American culture where we have ritual.” The cookbook also ranks dishes by difficulty level, so for those who are just starting to test the culinary waters, it’s hard to make that all-too-common mistake of trying to make a recipe that seems easy enough on paper but ultimately makes for a hellacious time in the kitchen.

Essential Pépin: This book isn’t due out until mid-October, so it won’t work as a gift idea for this Father’s Day. However, I’ve really enjoyed flipping through my review copy and Pépin is most definitely worth mentioning here because he’s a proud father and grandfather who featured his daughter Claudine in the television series Cooking with Claudine. And let’s face it, having spent six decades in the kitchen, the guy is at the top of his game. This new volume collects over 700 favorite Pépin recipes that have been revised and updated for the man (or woman) who enjoys entertaining with style. And I think there are enough low-fuss recipes in here that a home chef with some experience and skills won’t feel daunted. In the meantime, you can check out his memoir The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen or his extensive trove of cookbooks. Sadly, the pair of cookbooks centered around him and his daughter are out of print, so a used bookstore would be your only hope.