Wading through a bog of cranberry salads

One thing I've always looked out for in my old cookbooks is my Grandma's cranberry salad recipe. Her recipe was so beloved that it made an appearance at most holiday dinners-- not just Thanksgiving. It came out for Christmas and Easter too, even if it meant she had to remember to buy extra cranberries to freeze when they were in season so she'd have them later. It was also the only item I ever remember Grandpa helping her make. She was generally the cook, but when it was cranberry salad time, Grandpa got in on the act. He'd hand crank the cranberries and apples through their old meat grinder so they would be in appropriately small pieces to disperse throughout the Jell-O while Grandma supremed the oranges-- a step that she would normally consider too much of a hassle to bother with. They were serious about the cranberry salad. I always assumed Grandma had gotten the recipe off the back of some food packaging or from a neighbor who got it from a neighbor who got it from a community cookbook that slightly altered it from the back of some food packaging. This is the long way of saying that anytime I get a new salad or community cookbook, I expect to run across her recipe. I never do. When I got Recipes on Parade: Salads Including Appetizers (Military Officers' Wives Clubs, 1966), I thought I surely must see her recipe this time, as the book has soooo much real estate devoted to Jell-O-based salads, including multiple pages (pages!) of cranberry salads. Her salad is not in there, though.

Some of the salads are nearly devoid of fruit, like the Cranberry Salad Delight.

The canned cranberries are the only real fruit, joined by the flavorings from the pineapple-grapefruit gelatin (which was apparently a thing in the early 1960s!) and 7-Up.

Many include nuts and/or celery, neither of which Grandma used. (I don't think any of us would have been happy about celery in a fruity salad, and Jell-O-fied nuts just get soggy.)

Some of them include toppings, which hers did not have. No one in my family would have been impressed by old-fashioned mayonnaise on our jiggly treat. (Pretty sure I would have entirely refused to taste it if any portions even touched mayo, homemade or not.)

I might have been persuaded to try the one with marshmallow-studded sour cream topping if I had been unaware that this version had a little bit of mayo in the sour cream, though.

And some recipes are just way too fancy.

I'm not sure my Grandma ever even bought an avocado, much less put it into a Jell-O salad. (The same is true of Port wine.) And if the fancy ingredients in Cranberry Layered Mold would not have been enough to discourage her, the multi-layer construction would have done it. That's way too much fussing around.

Even though the book is stuffed with cranberry gelatin recipes (and there are more to come for the post-Thanksgiving weekend!), there's still nothing quite like Grandma's recipe. I don't know where she got it, and I'm still shocked that I haven't stumbled across it (or even one with her secret ingredient of orange juice concentrate to taste, to balance out the sweet and tangy flavors) after countless Jell-O recipes and almost a decade of writing this blog. Maybe Grandma occasionally got more creative in her cooking than I gave her credit for.