5/19/2023 0 Comments Raindrop cake houstonThe “Jurassic” scene, cut off before you get to the punchline - the girl clutching the spoon of Jell-O has seen the shadow of a velociraptor and, in it, her potential demise - is distilled into sheer terror. GIFs, while unrestricted in length, typically last only a matter of seconds (the faster to load), so these are moving images largely shorn of context, the residue of a culture cannibalized for parts and reduced to its starkest impulses. Perhaps the most telling GIF captures the moment in the 1993 blockbuster “Jurassic Park” when the undulations of a spoonful of green Jell-O turn seismic. (The 14th-century French cookbook “Le Viandier” advises, “Whoever wants to make a gelée must not sleep.”) Elsewhere in the world, different ingredients have long yielded textures of similar ambivalence: A Korean medical manual from the 17th century recommends acorn jelly for patients suffering from dysentery the discovery of agar is attributed to a 17th-century Japanese innkeeper who one morning found that his leftover seaweed soup had thickened into a solid.īut a number of people have come to fixate on the wobble alone, isolated in brief videos and GIFs of even the most banal-looking jellies, puddings and flans, whose only distinguishing feature is their capacity to shudder. While peasants fortified themselves with squelchy slabs of headcheese, elaborate aspics graced the tables of Europe’s upper classes, who could dispatch servants to do the time-consuming work of watching over the great pots of bones, hides, horns or hooves that had to be boiled until leached of their collagen, the fiberlike protein that is the main component of connective tissue and that, when heated, breaks down into gelatin. A recipe for qaris, fish tongues suspended in a congealed broth of fish heads boiled in vinegar, appears in the 10th-century Baghdadi cookbook “Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchen” and, by the 14th century, the culinary use of gelatin was recognized in Europe as both practical - functioning as a seal to protect meat from rot - and luxurious. The ancient Romans made proto-custards out of a surplus of eggs after the widespread domestication of fowl in their territories the technique was lost with the fall of empire but later rediscovered in Europe, where flan was enshrined in the Spanish culinary canon and, via the conquistadors, entered the cuisines of the Philippines and Mexico. Yet dishes that wobble are hardly novelties in cooking. For those who want to witness such convulsions in the flesh, the British culinary artists Bompas & Parr - who once half-engulfed an iron steamship in more than 14,500 gallons of lime jelly, the flavor highlighting the vulnerability of 19th-century sailors to scurvy - opened the Jelladrome at London’s Arcade Food Hall in April, serving jelly shots and teetering trifles (perhaps in homage to the jelly houses of the 18th century, akin to ice cream parlors and, as one city guide of the time noted, a favored trysting place for “rakes and girls of the town”). There are Instagram accounts and Facebook groups devoted to serious experiments in gelatin, but raw footage of a shapeless blob of Jell-O, simply shaken so it heaves, can just as easily earn thousands of views. How does a disembodied gesture, void of agency and intent, gain traction in a culture? Quivering foods, with jelly as their exemplar, have become objects of fascination in recent years, silly and mesmerizing in equal measure. Sometimes a human hand enters the frame, spanking a cheesecake to make it bounce or, in a curious trend that started in 2019, wielding a spoon to smack the bottom of a little gelatinous pig or bunny - reminding us that the food in question cannot move of its own power that it is not, in fact, alive. (These are Japanese cotton cheesecakes, so called because of their confounding lightness, achieved by folding in egg whites whipped into peaks and then baking the cakes in a hot-water bath.) Sometimes the oscillations are slowed down to a tidal ripple. Elsewhere online lurk ornate jellies, from 18th-century British molds, with high, gooey spires that dip wildly from side to side, to cheesecakes, ostensibly solid yet vibrating, as if in thrall to some erratic internal pulse. With fluted curves like a Bundt cake, it suggests a ball gown skirt gone rogue, the dancer within turned ghost or banished from the scene. IN A VIDEO clip posted to Instagram, a jelly shimmies.
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