I'm glad I don't remember summers from 1940, back before most homes had air conditioning and the easiest way for the family to stay cool was to run a few fans, wear the most worn-out overalls you owned because the holes let in the breeze, and eat cool meals, like the ones in 500 Delicious Salads (ed. Ruth Berolzheimer, 1940).
Of course, by "delicious," the title means only that each individual ingredient in a salad might be considered delicious by someone, not that they necessarily were delicious when they were all thrown together.
Fine, maybe I'm a weirdo because I hate the raw onion slices that so many people seem to love on sandwiches, but I'm not sure too many people beg for raw onion to be combined with citrus...
...or tropical fruits (plus celery!).
Aside from the "throw a raw onion in with it" school of salad making, there is also the once-popular notion that bananas went with everything.
I mean, who has not simply longed for canned salmon and chopped pickle in their banana and pineapple salad?
But my favorite salad, unsurprisingly, is a ring mold, its center filled with poorly-aged packing peanuts and its perimeter of evil eyes spying on all potential diners.
Okay, fine. It's a cranberry mold with shrimp in the middle and a cream-cheese-and-pineapple garnish on the edges.
But I would still be nervous with that thing staring at me! At least I could ascribe my nervous sweat to the oppressive heat of a 1940s kitchen rather than a fear of weird gelatin molds. Well, except that cranberries would be available in the fall rather than the summer, so my premise is not holding up that well, but nobody reads to the end of a post anyway, so I think I can get away with this ending. Tell me I'm wrong! (But please don't make me eat raw onions or stare that pineapple in the eye!)
Ha! Instead of remembering the un-air conditioned 1940s, we remember the un-air conditioned 1980s where your only hope of cooling down was to spend an hour wandering around Wal Mart. No, wait, we didn't have that un-classy of an upbringing. I like how you are supposed to "moisten" your banana salmon salad with mayonnaise. They so loved the word moist back then. At least they don't include the salmon head in the canning process. The last thing you need is a canned fish head staring at you accusingly.
ReplyDeleteThe cranberry mold looks like a good way to get out of cooking for Thanksgiving. If the pineapple eyes don't unnerve your guests enough, make sure to use undercooked shrimp and leave it sit out for a few hours. Nobody will want to come back next year.
I just remember decorating a cake in your bedroom because that was the only place we had air conditioning so the icing wouldn't melt! I don't miss that hot house....
DeleteI am amazed by how many cranberry Jell-O salads I've read without ever seeing our family recipe. I'm just glad ours did not involve shrimp.
Of course you don't see any Jell-O cranberry salads like our family recipe. It does not involve adding vinegar, celery, or nuts. It's all sweet stuff that goes together and the flavors and textures don't fight.
DeleteThe Jell-O recipes aren't all terrible-- I just mostly feature ones that are. Our recipe is yummy enough I would think it would be more popular.
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