Kelly Cannon-Miller stood on a chair in the middle of a crowded room as people walked clockwise around her. Everyone was admiring about 35 gelatin salads arranged on long tables set up in a U-shape around the perimeter of the room. Someone clapped loudly and whistled in an attempt to direct attention to Cannon-Miller.

“We are five minutes from judging! Five minutes from judging,” she said.

Central Oregon’s Deschutes Historical Museum was hosting the Holiday Gelatin Salad Show.

Cannon-Miller, executive director of the Deschutes Historical Museum, and her partner in gelatin, collections manager Rebekah Averette-Zaback, concocted the idea in 2024 while looking at historical cookbooks. They found themselves talking about gelatin and that one weird salad that almost always shows up on family holiday tables.

“We just had this moment where we wanted to do something purely for fun that was based in history, and this was the end result,” Cannon-Miller said.

For the second year in a row, earlier this month, contestants dug out family recipes or created new ones and entered the wobbly dishes into the gelatin salad show.

This year’s flier was adorned with a star-shaped holiday fruit cocktail salad and exhorted would-be contestants to “Let your freak holiday salad shine!”

And shine they did.

“Bend is kind of a weird city, it has a lot of weird people in it, which I really like and I feel like this Jell-O salad competition really fits in,” contestant Harrison Lowy said.

Entries included a savory claim-juice salad, inedible sculptural works of gelatin-adorned art, and all manner of family recipes. The only limit was a contestant’s gelatin mold.

Lowy, 23, made a vegan salad using agar agar instead of the traditional collagen-based setting agent. He wasn’t trying to make a vegan dish, he was just trying to stay within his Thai-inspired theme. Agar agar is popular thickener often found in Asian desserts. Lowy entered his dish, a “coconut melo melo” sweet creation, into the Best Presentation category.

Cannon-Miller, 55 and Averette-Zaback, 50, decided on four categories when they created the gelatin show: Best Presentation, Most Savory, Family’s Salad and Oops! Nailed it! The final category is a catch-all for salads that were valiant endeavors but succumbed to extenuating circumstances.

Last year, a champagne and strawberries creation fell to pieces on the way to the show. It was entered into and won the Oops! Nailed it! Category according to Cannon-Miller.

“It was just a big pile on a plate, but boy, he gave it his college try. And actually people tasted it and really loved it,” Averette-Zaback said.

The day of this year’s show, Liz Goodrich, 59, a returning contestant, was afraid she might have to enter her great-aunt’s savory tomato aspic salad in the Oops! Nailed It! category. It hadn’t set properly even after she put it in the museum refrigerator for a last minute cool down.

“I’m not sure the five minutes in the fridge is going to make a difference,” she said with a chuckle. The salad ended up being a bit “loose” as she called it.

What Goodrich’s salad lacked in firmness, it made up for with curb appeal. She placed the casserole dish upon a bed of pine boughs and flashing holiday lights.

“I’m not feeling real confident this year,” She said as she eyed her competition in the Family’s Salad category. “Look at that beautiful tree!”

The gelatin tree in question belonged to Michael Hopp. Throughout the three-hour event, people crowded around his sweet salad, admiring the wobbly conifer.

Hopp, 35, created a red salad in a christmas tree shape, embedded with fruits and garnished with spinach leaves and a gold star.

“Hopefully it makes gran proud,” he said. His 90-year-old grandmother used to make gelatin dishes for nearly every holiday. At some point, the tradition was passed to him and his mother.

Mel Siegel, a few years younger than Hopp’s grandmother, said his personal relationship with gelatin goes back to his early childhood in Brooklyn. “My mother was already a Jell-O freak,” Siegel, 84, said.

She would fill the kitchen sink with Jell-O and bathe Siegel in it.

“Of course she would rinse me off afterwards, but I would get a good soak in the Jell-O,” he said.

His favorite flavor? Tutti-frutti.

As people came to see the gelatin show salads, the temperature in the room climbed. Members of the intergenerational crowd dug plastic spoons into salad samples with delight – but only after judges had passed by and scored the entries.

When it came time for those judges to review Amber Clegg’s Gelatina de Mosaico, she reached into her pocketbook and slapped a few cents onto each of the three judges’ clipboards. One judge pocketed a tidy 15 cents out of the deal.

“I heard them willing to be bribed,” she said, “I think it’s going to help!” The salad, with notes of horchata, was a clear crowd favorite. By the end of the event, it was nearly gone.

Prizes were awarded outside the three-story stone historical museum building, in the sunshine on a day with unseasonably warm weather.

Clegg, 48, ended up winning the Best Presentation category and also took home the Best in Show prize. It was the first time she had made the salad creation she’d entered and likely the last, she said.

In the Family Salad category, Hopp prevailed over Goodrich, and Lowy was given an honorable mention for creating a vegan-friendly dish.

“Oh my gosh, that was so fun,” Averette-Zaback said as she cleaned up after prizes were awarded.

Before this year’s event, she said, she didn’t have any expectations. She just hoped people were still interested enough to participate for a second time. “I hope it wasn’t lightning in a bottle.”

To her delight, people turned out – to enter gelatin salads in the show, and even more showed up to spectate. They packed into the schoolroom like sardines, just jiggling around, for the love and loathe of gelatin.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/12/25/second-gelatin-show-bend-deschutes-history-museum/