In a 1952 “Better Homes and Gardens” recipe for “Lime Cheese Salad,” an otherworldly combination of vinegar, grated onion, cottage cheese and mayonnaise is suspended in a lurid green fruit gelatin. “Six delighted people will love the unusual flavor of this easy-to-make, wonderful-to-eat, Jell-O salad,” the magazine advertisement reads. It can be difficult to imagine a world in which this “unusual flavor” is highlighted, on purpose, to increase sales of boxed Jell-O.
These concoctions have mostly fallen out of favor, but when made just right, such salads can be a delightful way to suspend your fruits and nuts in a wobbly ring of gelatinized juice. Sweet variations like strawberry-pretzel and mandarin orange are still popular in the Midwest, as is a fruity cranberry rendition that tastes great at Thanksgiving. With its crimson wibble-wobble, cranberry salad can be good enough to replace the canned stuff.
Those who see Jell-O salad as an opportunity for a little fun will be rewarded tenfold.
In this recipe, chopped walnuts and green apple are bound by a sweet-tart cranberry gelatin. You can shape it in a fancy mold, one with aspirational crenelations, if you wish, or in a wide, shallow bowl for a simpler look that your true friends will call “elegant.”
This salad can be served as a side to turkey or duck, and as a dessert to be eaten with sweetened whipped cream raked through with ground cardamom, vanilla or nothing. That’s what this dish does best, after all: It straddles worlds. But in this case, it doesn’t just straddle the line between dessert and side dish, it completely disregards it. A cousin of regional specialties like ambrosia — a curious amalgam of fruits, marshmallows and sour cream — Jell-O salad is a dish that many today might balk at. But those who see it as an opportunity for a little fun, as many in our country do? They will be rewarded tenfold.
The thing about these salads is that you can fill them with whatever you want. I loved the way I could zest the limes first and rub the zest into some granulated sugar to release the oils. That smelled good. I especially loved that when I tossed a handful of toasted nuts into the lime sugar, it made them taste sparkly. A hint of citric acid gave them the neon tartness of a fruity breakfast cereal. The nuts in these salads have never made sense to me, but if I garnished my jellied castle with a louder note — these sour lime-sugared nuts — then maybe their addition would pull the dish together. With the green apple, this combination reminds me of a Waldorf salad. The zested limes are juiced in the end, closing the loop and lending their cutting green edge.
This updated Jell-O salad of my dreams has fruity flavors that hark back to waking up at 4 a.m. to begin Thanksgiving dinner in Augusta, Ga. A box of cereal and milk sat on the kitchen counter. We had all the time in the world, including an hour or two to watch cartoons before we had to help Aunt Joy with the cranberries.
Though seasonal cranberries evoke Thanksgiving especially, you could serve this gleaming centerpiece at any holiday meal. What a conversation starter! Feel free to swap out the apple here for peeled and chopped oranges or canned pineapple, or use a mix of your favorites. Note that certain fruits like fresh pineapple, mango, kiwi and papaya contain enzymes that prevent jellies from setting. I would skip the cheese, but your Jell-O salad, your rules.
