Their Thanksgiving potluck included ‘chicken jelly,’ Grape-Nuts muffins, and long-forgotten Philly delicacies

The Atwater Kent Collection’s holiday potluck on Monday involved Log Cabin pecan pie, Grape-Nuts orange muffins, and apple meringue pudding. But the undisputed star, the dish no one was eager to eat but everyone wanted to discuss, was the “chicken jelly” — a gelatinous loaf featuring bits of chicken, carrot, and celery suspended in translucent broth.

“The taste is great. It tastes like chicken soup,” said Michael Shepherd, assistant director of the collection, cheerfully jiggling his creation. (To be fair, he also made the apple meringue pudding.)

“Like cold, hard chicken soup,” said Alisa Kraut, the collection’s artifact registrar.

Some offices host cookie swaps or catered lunches during the holidays. At Atwater Kent, a repository of roughly 130,000 objects related to Philadelphia history, staffers this year threw a potluck in which every dish came from a recipe in their archival collection.

There were thousands of options to choose from, scattered across cookbooks, handwritten cards, and pamphlets distributed by companies to help sell their products (United Fruit, for example, advised cooks to incorporate bananas into every dish in a 1950s cookbook).

Upstairs at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ Hamilton Building, the staff introduced their creations and toasted. Then they drank sparkling grape juice out of red plastic cups and ate ancient recipes off paper plates.

The chicken jelly recipe came from a pamphlet distributed by Colburn’s, a company based in Philadelphia that imported and manufactured spices and sold seasonings all over the city in the early 1900s, including at the William Butler Stores, a popular chain of Philly groceries.

The sparse recipe: “Cut the fowl as for fricassee, boil until tender, take out the chicken and chop it into small pieces …” There were no measurements or time limits; Shepherd bought a rotisserie chicken from Acme and proceeded from there.

“I gave the leftover to my dog, and even she was hesitant,” he said.

A number of staffers chose recipes from Horn & Hardart Automat, the Philadelphia-based restaurant chain that sold food and drink through vending machines in the early 1900s. The Automat recipe box that is part of the collection was salvaged from a dumpster, so it is not clear if it contained the chain’s greatest hits. The rescued box also included recipes from individuals, ARA, the company now known as Aramark, and General Foods, now known as Kraft.

Kraut made ARA’s version of “chocolate candy cookies”, a no-bake fudge-like concoction drawn from an industrial-scale June 1967 recipe that called for 1.5 pounds of sugar. Pauline Male, a collections associate, made the Grape-Nuts muffins inspired by a General Foods recipe also salvaged from the dump. Gina Torres, a collections assistant, baked a pecan pie from the Log Cabin Syrup Co., using another industrial-scale recipe that incorporates both corn syrup and Log Cabin syrup.

“It was very sweet,” Torres said.

Before the concept of “food science” took off in the 1930s, many published recipes instructed people to basically “cook until done,” Kraut said.

“It’s like, bake it. Fill with apples,” she said.

Some staffers are already planning for the next potluck. Maybe they will prepare a ham and pineapple spread, or serve cold condensed soup. There could always be more Jell-O salads. Collections assistant Piper Burnett suggested a World War II-themed meal, “with rations!”

The talk then turned to modern-day recipes. Torres said she had recently cooked a TikTok-famous fried sandwich, involving cheese, Spam, and ramen noodles. Her colleagues were delighted.

“In 50 years, somebody in a special collection is going to say, ‘I’m going to do the historic TikTok recipe for the Spam ramen fried sandwich,’” Kraut said. “And everybody will go crazy for it.”