Fresh Cranberry Salad: or, If you use lemon jello, it's not a dessert

Christmas time is meat grinder time!

Cranberry Salad 1 (3-oz) package lemon jello ¾ cup sugar 1 cup boiling water 2 cups raw cranberries (about 7.3 oz by weight) 1 cup finely diced celery (about 5 sticks) 2 tablespoons lemon juice 1 cup chopped almonds, if desired Whisk the jello and sugar into the boiling water. If they don't completely dissolve, just heat the water up-- whether on the stove or in the microwave. Set aside. Coarsely grind the cranberries, whether in a food processor or a hand-cranked grinder. Then chop the celery if you haven't already. Add the cranberries, celery, and lemon juice to the gelatin. If any juice dripped out of the cranberries while grinding them, add that too. Refrigerate until partially set. It's ready when the berries and celery stay put after you stir it, instead of floating back to the top. Then stir well and pour into individual molds, or a square pan, or any other container of your choice. (I usually just put it in a clear bowl and serve without trying to unmold it. The light goes through the glass and shows the color really nicely.) Refrigerate until firm. Serve with the almonds sprinkled on top. Note: If you really want to follow the original, whip about a half-cup of cream. Then fold in a half-cup of mayonnaise and spread over the top. Unknown book or handout (probably 1930s)Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

It looks like Christmas is gradually making a post-covid comeback. People put a lot more decorations out this year than last, reviving the beloved tradition of turning extension cords into fire hazards. And we are seeing a slow return of evening-news angst about "Christmas spending" and whether it will prop up the economy. 

Despite Christmas wedging its festive way back into our lives, there are still signs that pre-pandemic prosperity has yet to trickle down. First of all, the store is selling red velvet cake rolls, chocolate cake rolls, and pumpkin------ wait a minute.

Is this a good time to remind everyone that subbing carrot for pumpkin was popular the last time we had a depression?

Also, the grocery now stocks things that probably landed in the dumpster out back before everything got so expensive.

We're not here to gawk at stores selling recognizable animal parts here at A Book of Cookrye. Like, we all know where meat comes from. But I don't think calling them "chicken paws" is an improvement. More importantly, they are nearly $2 per pound. 

On a more anecdotal note, thrift-shop and garage sale offerings keep getting rattier. We've long passed the time when you could get nearly-new things from Craigslist (or the various sites that replaced it).

But happily for those of us who are ducking the holidays, you can still get cheap fresh fruit at Christmas. The last cranberries from Thanksgiving are still on sale in the back corner of the produce section, which is both a testament to their shelf life and also a wonderful bargain. And as we learned while flipping through my great-grandmother's cookbook, apparently they liked cranberry-celery gelatin just as I do (if perhaps not as much).

I don't know what book or handout this comes from, but the page looks like the 1930s.

Incidentally, my great-grandmothers entire recipe binder is on this page if you'd like to see what else she clipped or wrote down.

This year, I lost the screw that holds the grinder's handle on. It remains at large, even after I emptied every single drawer it might be in (and all the other ones too). Fortunately, the hardware store had a replacement:

With our kitchen devices back in order, it was time to get pulverize a lot of cranberries!

Soon, we had a pile of fruit shards and some very pretty juice that had dripped out the back.

Now that all of our produce was reduced to tiny pieces, it was time to get down to salad.

I wasn't raised on midwestern food, so I can't quite tell what separates "salad gelatin" from "dessert gelatin." But from what I understand, lemon Jello equals salad, even if you suspend marshmallows in it. Since this is my first time interacting with lemon Jello, I tried a spoonful. It tastes like cheap lemonade that contains absolutely no citrus.

It looks like our cooking pot has become a chamber pot.

Interestingly, this recipe seems to end with raw cranberries. I've never partaken of raw cranberries aside from eating a few out of the bag when I'm cooking them. Perhaps not cooking the fruit makes this a salad? (And the celery of course.)

I tasted a spoonful of our salad, and it was oddly bitter and sharp. The instruction to serve with mayonnaise on top didn't sound so weird anymore. Like, this was definitely sweet, but it wasn't dessert-sweet.

Then, as I was putting the book away, I realized I had forgotten something...

Yes, I didn't see that we should have added a fairly substantial amount of sugar to this. (I thought the sugar in the Jello box was meant to suffice.) This was easy to correct, if a little annoying.

Isn't the color beautiful?

The recipe calls for stirring in sliced almonds. But as we have have learned from previous gelatins, nuts go weird and soggy in gelatin after a day or two. It's like biting into a wad of boiled cartilage in a pot roast.  

But to see just if this recipe was better with all of its ingredients, I sprinkled some almonds on top. To my surprise, all the flavors were perfect together. Who knows, I just might try a bit of mayonnaise on top to see if they were right about that too. 

I liked this a lot because I like cranberry sauce with celery in it, but obviously not everyone does. The cranberries completely covered the artificial lemon flavoring except for a faint chemically bitter undertone. And we can pretend that the raw fruit is better for us even after a deluge of sugar. In short, this is really good if you like cranberry sauce with recognizable fruit in it. The almonds are delicious on top. The celery, of course, is optional.