In 2023 I walked up the driveway to Susie Hamilton’s tinsel-encrusted 1970s home, clad in green bell-bottoms and a polyester blouse, to attend the fourth annual Aspic Invitational. Thrilled to have scored a coveted invitation, I quivered with anticipation almost as much as my entry—an herb-infused lemon gelatin column layered with goat cheese, fig, almond, and pears, and studded with Thai basil flowers—did.
Much to my surprise, I was declared the winner at the end of the ceremonial judging, but maybe I shouldn’t have been shocked; other contenders included gelled potato salad, a clam chowder bombe, and a dramatic reenactment of Aunt Bethany’s kitty kibble Jell-O from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. My aim to make something edible and in line with modern flavors and textures paid off, but don’t mistake that for contempt toward the more traditional iterations from the 1960s and ’70s. I’ve made dozens of gelatin dishes using vintage recipes out of deep, if perverse, love. The only person who’s a bigger fanatic than I am? Hamilton.
If you spend a little time with her, you’ll start to see why she’s willing to keep days gone by alive and . . . wriggling.
Hamilton lives in the mid-century enclave of Windcrest, nestled in northeast San Antonio. Founded in 1959 by Murray Winn (of the Winn’s Variety Store family) and his wife, Barbee, it started as farmland and grew to a 2.2-square-mile city, with houses largely built in the 1960s and ’70s, a golf course, and its own fire department. If you’ve heard of it already, it might be because its outrageous drive-through holiday displays are legendarily cutthroat. The recent city council election was similarly lit; Hamilton won a seat after an unusually controversial race and was sworn in last month.
She says there’s a lot more to Windcrest’s retro-rooted living than that, though. She and her husband, Marc Sauceda, chose the area for its big trees and neighborly atmosphere. It was the natural choice that fit their shared interests in vintage clothing and classic cars, as well as Hamilton’s professional career as a production designer for film, TV, and advertising. She specializes in the oft-attempted but rarely perfected retro vibe for regional clients like Whataburger.
The logical consequence of this yesteryear obsession? Gelatin, and lots of it.
If you’ve been around long enough to be familiar with twentieth-century ranch homes and A-frames, you might also remember the once numerous variations on Jell-O: lime-flavored Jell-O with pears, congealed Dr Pepper, and chicken salad rings garnished with extra mayo. Everyone from Miriam “Ma” Ferguson to Lady Bird Johnson had a wobbly signature dish, and homegrown tray-line titan Luby’s Cafeteria pioneered the Jell-O array at a child’s-eye level. Such delights were de rigueur at Texas potlucks, church suppers, and bridal showers for decades. If Hamilton gets her wish, they will be again.
When she was a kid growing up in the 1980s, Hamilton says, she had assumed she’d someday attend swinging soirees like the ones she saw on TV, with fancy clothes and dinners. But in 2019, the year after she and Sauceda moved into their first home, she thought, “We’re the adults now; where is it? I wanted to give people a reason to get out of the house and have fun, some place that wasn’t a club or a concert, to give people the experience we thought we were going to have when we were adults.” She and Sauceda often attend city events or dinner with neighbors in period dress. “We call it Windcresting,” Hamilton laughs, “and we wanted an excuse to do more of that.”
The first event was initially planned as a vintage costume house party, but in the months leading up to it, her friends’ conversations sometimes turned to Jell-O from the 1960s and “how gross it was,” she recalls. As the invites went around, she says, “I started telling people, ‘Bring an aspic if you want.’ I thought maybe three people would do it, but I believe we had over ten the first time. We didn’t expect anyone to eat it.” That time, there wasn’t much attention paid to flavor, but there was a trend toward a shocking visual quality to most of the entries, including one made by Hamilton’s sister, Morena Hockley, a professional crafter who’s married to an orthodontist. It was a decorative ring of gummy teeth.
As they arranged everything on the main table for a photo op, Hamilton’s friend Grant Goodrich volunteered to try it. In fact, he agreed to try all of them, and that’s how the awards portion of the Aspic Invitational was born. Hamilton went around her house grabbing vintage thrift finds for prizes. Goodrich has remained the sole judge (except for an illness one year), but Hamilton’s intrepid young son, Marcel, has made a tradition of trying everything right alongside him.
After a COVID hiatus in 2020, the couple approached the 2021 Aspic Invitational with a renewed devotion to the craft. The vintage dress party was now secondary to the main event: a gelatin-laden showcase and tasting. Because more attendees were attempting to make their dishes more than just hypothetically edible, there were initially a lot of sweet contenders. “In ’22 and ’23 I started trying to steer people toward making a traditional aspic because we got a lot of ambrosia salad. That’s fine—we group them all at the end of the tasting—but I’m trying to steer some people toward savory.”
One year, a friend of Hamilton’s brought her gourmand husband along. As he looked at the disturbing tableau, he said that he had misunderstood because he had expected traditional, boiled-bone aspics, Julia Child–style. “Oh no,” Hamilton recalls, answering, “This is not that at all. This is the opposite of that. You’re about to see a lot of canned meat.”
To date, the official invitational table has featured a boiled vegetable mosaic encircled by mashed potatoes, a barbecue sauce mold, curried corn in the shape of a lobster, a BLT ring, and the infamous Hellmann’s congealed coleslaw snowman, among many other morbid delights. In 2022 I entered individual servings of chicken noodle soup salad, a hideous refutation of everything that makes soup nourishing to the soul. It’s condensed soup mixed with lemon Jell-O, mayonnaise, whipped cream, and canned chicken, iced with jellied tomato soup. It was not a winner, in more ways than one.
Despite that, I thoroughly enjoyed the process of perfecting this odd hobby that Hamilton and I share. Although it’s easy to laugh about them, successful gelatin molds are serious business. Pitfalls abound: failure to set, separation of layers, contents sticking to the mold, or (the very worst mishap of all) poorly dissolved gelatin forming a rubbery, tooth-squeaking cap on what should have been your crowning achievement. It takes work to engage in this culinary cosplay. Practice once or twice, though, and you can expect praise, plus the occasional gasp of delighted dismay.
If you’re looking to rekindle the bouncy flame yourself, any Junior League or community cookbook printed before the 1990s is sure to have some candidates, as well as many a grandmother’s recipe box. If none of those are at hand, consider tracking down a copy of Joys of Jell-O, a recipe book published by Jell-O with several editions in the mid-century, at a local library. In recent years, I’ve made Ring Around the Tuna and Shrimp Salad Surprise cubes with grapefruit, olives, and artichoke from my own 1970s copy. I think such hardships have made me a better person.
As for Hamilton, she has been gratified by her community’s response, noting that although the neighborhood is diverse and has lots of young families now, it also still houses quite a few “old timers.” “They really get a kick out of [the Aspic Invitational],” says Hamilton, “I haven’t met anyone who thinks it’s good; they will just say it was never a good idea, then or now.” Her neighbors of a certain age often drop in at the party to bring crockpots of their signature 1960s-era spiced drinks or just to gawk at the display hailing from their own youths, but Hamilton is happy to report that no one has mistaken the event for disrespect. It’s funny, but it’s not a joke, and Hamilton wouldn’t want her fellow Windcrestians to feel mocked. “If anything, people are excited that we’re getting people into it, because they feel like it will preserve the character of the community.”
The fifth annual Aspic Invitational will be held this year on December 15, by invitation only, regrettably. Hamilton is again encouraging attendees to find the perfect double-knit suit and lean into the savory vein. I’m still deciding what to make this year—perhaps a chamoy mango salad or an homage to the historic Stagecoach Inn’s tomato aspic. And how tantalizing to speculate about others’ pending entries! A glistening ham-and-Clamato ring? A shrimp-and-olive tower, crowned with deviled eggs? A loaf with gherkins and Brazil nuts? Only time will tell which wins, but regardless of the shape it takes, one thing is for certain: Susie Hamilton is perfecting the art of having her mold and breaking it, too.
