Cool Fall Soup-Jells

Sometimes on cool fall mornings, you think you might want a big, hot bowl of soup later-- such a cozy idea! Maybe you even stocked up on a bit of canned soup for just such an occasion. And then as the day goes on, the temperature rises from maybe the upper 40s to mid 70s and those cans of soup lose their luster.

Well, Marye Dahnke's Salad Book (1954) has the perfect solution: gelatin with soup in it! Yeah, I know I've featured recipes like these (but from other cookbooks) before, but I will never cease to be amazed by how many people used to seem to think that combining Jell-O and Campbell's was a great plan. I hope you are similarly amazed and amused, but if not, well... Where is your sense of wonder? (As in, "I wonder what was wrong with the people who wrote these recipes.")

At least the old recipes calling for a can of tomato soup make some degree of sense. Tomato was a pretty common aspic flavor, so soup wasn't that different from the tomato puree that usually went into an aspic, for example.

And it's not like too many people would object to combining it with a brick of cream cheese (except maybe on health grounds). A brick of cream cheese can make just about anything better.

A bit more out-there but still pretty common are the ones that call for a can of cream-of-something soup.

This time, our cream of chicken soup is combined with a smaller brick of cream cheese. I'm starting to think the real attraction of these soup-and-gelatin molds might be the excuse to eat cream cheese.

Tomato and cream-of-something soups tend to be the only ones I see turned into gelatin molds, but this book goes all-in and even recommends turning canned gumbo into a shimmery and wobbly salad.

 And of course, this one gets the little brick of cream cheese too, along with plenty of ground ham. (I'm not sure New Orleans would really want to claim this, but at least this seems more plausibly connected to New Orleans than some of the "Mexican" salads seemed connected to Mexico.)

Whether your fall is turning out to be too hot, too cold, or just right, I hope it's at least as spooky as a soup-haunted blob of gelatin.