Baghdad Cream Jell-O Recipe from the Jack Benny Show, 1939

Look, a new retro Jell-O recipe! And it’s a weird one! It’s buried at the end of an old Jack Benny radio program, a.k.a. The Jell-O Show. Jack Benny’s most memorable sponsor was General Foods’ Jell-O, and the program featured lots of ads and jokes about Jell-O. You can find this episode on various YouTubes, but you have to select one that hasn’t removed the ads!

I haven’t been able to find this recipe anywhere else online, except in the audio recordings of the show. I also haven’t seen it in any old Jell-O cookbooks, either. (Maybe for good reason?)

First the context in the show; next the recipe, transcribed directly from the radio program; after that, my review of the dish itself, since I made it.

This recipe is from the Jack Benny episode that played Sunday, March 5, 1939, and featured “A Day at Santa Anita Park” and “Jesse James Part 2.” The former was a chance to crack jokes about Benny’s supposed penny-pinching, centering on his annoyance at having bet and lost two dollars (which we find out weren’t even his own) at the Santa Anita racetrack the day before.

The second part of the program was a spoof of the 1939 film Jesse James that starred Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda, Nancy Kelly, and Randolph Scott. The movie is notorious for its historical inaccuracies, but Benny and Co.’s rendition makes the movie look like a sober historical documentary by comparison. For starters, in the spoof, the two James brothers are named not Jesse and Frank, but Jesse and Juicy. Benny plays Jesse, disguising his voice quite admirably with a deep cowboy drawl; brother “Juicy” is played by Andy Devine, who couldn’t disguise his wheezy, cracking voice if his life depended on it. (“You ought to do something about that voice of yours, Juicy. It sounds like a man with squeaky shoes, walking on oyster shells, eating peanut brittle”!)

Then you come to the part where they give the recipe.

After the Jesse James spoof concludes, announcer Don Wilson reads the recipe and its preceding ad copy. Here’s what he says:

Did you ever look through those intriguing travel booklets they get out nowadays, and find yourself longing for a taste of foreign lands? Well, here’s a dessert with a fascinating foreign flavor, and it’s easy to enjoy right at home. “Baghdad Cream”: a delicious new idea your family will love—for it’s a grand combination of Orange Jell-O with canned pineapple, prunes, and whipped cream . . . and here’s how you make it:

Dissolve 1 package of Orange Jell-O in 1 pint of hot water, and chill until cold and syrupy. Fold in ½ cup of heavy cream, whipped only until thick and shiny. Then add 1 cup of cooked prune pulp and ½ cup of canned crushed pineapple. Mold until firm.

It’s a swell-looking and swell-tasting dessert—a tangy-smooth combination of pineapple and prunes blended with whipped cream and a shimmering mold of Orange Jell-O, with its delicious extra-rich fruit flavor.

So try Baghdad Cream soon! Ask your grocer tomorrow for Orange Jell-O.

So, what do you think? First, and quite obviously, it’s only marginally Iraqi, and hardly “foreign.” (Unless you're thinking of someplace like Bagdad, Kentucky, or Bagdad, Arizona.) The link with “Baghdad” is that it uses prunes, which, along with dates, figs, and apricots, are notable products of Iraq (though today, most prunes sold in our country come from California). But Jell-O, whipping cream, and pineapple—and the whole concept of a Jell-O dessert or salad—is distinctly American.

That this idea could be marketed at all as a “foreign flavor” really makes you question what we think we know today, with all our love of global foods. Until you travel, you don’t really know. When this radio show aired (March 1939), World War II hadn’t started. The United States didn’t enter the war until the end of 1941 . . . but when it was over, American soldiers who had been deployed overseas came back with a better understanding (and appreciation) for “foreign flavors.” This is one of the factors that led to America’s postwar explorations of pizza-pies (“it’s like a huge pancake, topped with a tomato-cheese mixture, and baked until crust is crisp and golden brown”), French cuisine, and chop suey, chow mein, sukiyaki, and other “Oriental” food.

Is it “swell-looking”? Well, the brownish chunks of cooked prunes sank toward the bottom, and I thought the smooth, creamy-looking top surface looked like flesh. Like, it was pretty close to my own skin color, pinkish-yellowish-tan. I will keep this in mind for Halloween molds. It would look incredibly creepy, molded inside a face mask.

It is unclear how you’re supposed to prepare the “cooked prune pulp.” I diced about ¾ cup of prunes, loosely packed, cooked them with about a cup of water, and the result, after about a half hour of simmering, amounted to about 1 cup. I made sure they were chilled before adding them to the Jell-O. I didn’t put them through a blender or food mill, because I thought it would make the whole dessert an ugly brown. I thought that semi-definable chunks of brown would be preferable to a more even blending of orange and brown. But maybe not. Maybe smoothly puréed pulp is the better way to go.

I think the next time I make this, I’ll add a second layer of orange Jell-O that’s clear, and maybe use the rest of the can of crushed pineapple in that part. And no, I didn’t “mold” this dish; I just put it into a 9-by-9-inch Pyrex baking dish. As a crown, a tower, an . . . edifice, it would've looked more interesting. So no wonder it didn’t look like much. Maybe a garnish would have helped.

Is it “swell-tasting”? Actually, yes. If you’re a grown-up, with grown-up tastes, this is really darned good. The unsweetened whipped cream and the fairly mellow sweetness of the prunes take the edge off the Orange Jell-O’s sugary quality. Also, I used crushed pineapple packed in juice (not heavy syrup, which they probably would have used in 1939) ("Juicy James" would approve), and that, too, was another step away from cloying sweetness. It was pretty darn good, and I’ll certainly make it again.

. . . Maybe even at Halloween!

If you’re interested in Jell-O and its relationship with Jack Benny, there’s some really good information in Jell-O: A Biography: the History and Mystery of “America’s Most Famous Dessert,” by Carolyn Wyman (San Diego: Harcourt, 2001).