"Salads are refreshing, lovely... like coming upon a woodland spring, clear and cool. Beauty will be the reward of your understanding touch. And health benefits will abundantly bless your table through the precious vitamins and minerals of crisp, sparkling salad ingredients. Salads are the delightful way to ensure those prescribed raw vegetables and fruits every day."
-Betty Crocker (from the 1950 first edition of Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book)
What do you think of when I say salad?
Garden salad? Caesar salad? Potato salad? Tuna salad? Fruit salad?
Do you think of pudding?
When I pulled out my grandmother's recipe for Pistachio Salad, I started to question the definition of salad. I pulled out vintage and modern cookbooks and read all of the salad chapters. I found plenty of gelatin, but no pudding. Even my 1989 version of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book includes gelatin based dishes in the salad chapter.
Gelatin was used to preserve meats and vegetables and was made into elaborate shapes for hundreds of years. In the mid-19th century a powdered gelatin was developed for housewives, so they wouldn't have to spend the day boiling calves' feet. Pearle B. Wait took things one step further and started adding sugar and fruit flavors to the powdered gelatin and created Jell-O. In the first half of the 20th century, Knox and Jell-O put out a plethora of cookbooks as marketing tools to sell more gelatin.
Apparently, it worked. Home cooks adopted many of the dishes, cookbook writers included them in their works, and church potlucks were never without one. Some of the more disturbing recipes I ran across were: Frosted Meat Loaf Salad, Jewel-Toned Ham Salad Mold, and Coleslaw Souffle Salad.
Now that I have ruined your appetite, I'll get back to the recipe on hand. I'm guessing that all of these gelatin salads led to making the leap to an instant pudding salad- the boxes are right next to each other, after all. And there is fruit in it. Truth be told, this particular "salad" is really a dessert. To her credit, Betty Crocker included a special section for Dessert Salads. This would be right at home there.
Here's the mixture before the Cool Whip is added:
And here is the finished product and the recipe:
So the final question is, is it any good? My girls didn't care for it. Their complaint was that the pineapple ruined the texture. The only thing I didn't like, was that coating your tongue gets after eating anything with Cool Whip in it. As soon as we all tasted it, we decided it should be called Fluff. It was the first word that came to all of our minds. Digging into my second helping, I decided I liked it.
It's not gourmet or sophisticated or healthy, but it is a treat. To me it tastes like childhood and potlucks and cafeterias. It's simple and sweet and creamy. And some days, that's just what I need.