With the heatwave firmly in place, we at A Book of Cookrye are trying to indulge ourselves without turning on the oven. Even if the power company ran buy-one-get-one-free special on kilowatt-hours, who wants to pull cookies out of the oven when it's 105 degrees out? (That's 41° for our Celsius friends.) So, instead of baking a heavy dessert, we are making a nice, refreshing salad.
| Mardi Gras Salad 1 (3-oz) package lemon gelatin 1 cup boiling water 1 (20-oz) can diced pineapple or pineapple tidbits* ½ cup maraschino cherries (or one 10-oz jar) 1 cup ginger ale 4 oz mini marshmallows (or two heaping cups) Whipped cream, if desired Pour the pineapple into a strainer and let it sit for about 30 minutes. If desired, cut the pineapple into smaller pieces afterward. Meanwhile in a large mixing bowl, dissolve the gelatin in the boiling water. Set aside to cool. Cut half of the cherries into quarters. Save the remaining cherries for garnish. Mix the ginger ale, pineapple, and cherries into the gelatin. Refrigerate, stirring occasionally, until it is firm enough that the marshmallows don't float and the fruit don't sink. If you want to speed this up, you can put the bowl in a much larger bowl full of ice water (or pot of ice water, or whatever else is big enough) and stir it for a few minutes. When the salad is firm enough, pour it whatever container or mold you want it to serve it from. (I just let it firm up in the bowl.) Refrigerate overnight. Serve "piled gayly" (the original recipe's words) in small bowls. Garnish each one with whipped cream (if desired) and a cherry. *Be sure you get the correct type of canned pineapple. I accidentally used crushed pineapple the first time and it never set. Note: If you want to very strictly follow the original recipe, pour the salad into a square baking dish to firm up. Cut into squares when set. Serve each portion on lettuce, and top each one with mayonnaise mixed a little pineapple juice (which you saved from draining the pineapple). Garnish each one with a cherry. Or, spoon the salad into "slim stemmed sherbet glasses" and top with whipped cream and a cherry.
Newspaper clipping, Chicago area, 1930s-50s
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...Did you think we would make a lettuce salad in these cyclosporic times? It seems like every week brings more produce recalls.* I know we are all glad to have eliminated all those tedious food regulations and made everything more efficient.
This salad comes from my great-grandmother's recipe binder. As a reminder, she was from Chicago and therefore from the Midwest. Therefore, this is not a dessert even though it contains marshmallows.
Before we did anything else, we set our pineapple aside to drain. Doesn't it look like a beautiful mound of blue Hawaii?
Next, the recipe calls for diced maraschino cherries. I quartered them because it seemed like the perfect size. Their flavor would probably disappear if we cut them too small.
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| As a recipe note, I also cut the pineapple into smaller pieces. |
And now, with all the advance preparation out of the way, we got to the foundation of our salad: Lemon Jello! (Or lemon store-brand gelatin because I'm not paying extra for a different logo on the same box.) It smelled like a bowl of knockoff Lucky Charms. Of all the gelatins, Lemon Jello is one of the most frightening ways to begin a salad. You never know whether you're going to get fruit, olives, or Spam in it. (Or, any combination of the three!) Since this recipe starts with pineapple instead of horseradish, I wasn't too worried.
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| So many salad disasters start with a bowl that looks just like this. |
Next, we added our diced cherries and... an entire quarter-pound marshmallows. In the olden days, anyone making this salad would have needed to cut up an entire quarter-pound of the sticky things. But at some point in the years after my great-grandmother cut this out of the newspaper, some blessed and ingenious person (who was probably tired of gummy scissors) invented mini marshmallows. Can you tell that a salad lies half-assembled beneath them?
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| I don't know if this recipe came out during WWII rationing. But in a ration-coupon sense, it is sugar free. |
I tried a spoonful of our uncongealed salad and liked it more than I expected. I've seen a lot of unnerving congealed salads from the Midwest around my great-grandmother's time, but this one is pineapple, lemon, and ginger with a cherry on top. No olives lurk in the ingredients waiting to ruin everything. (We are at some point supposed to get out the mayonnaise, but we'll get there when we get there.)
The recipe next says to "let the mixture cool, stirring occasionally, til it starts to thicken." I first thought this would be like the applesauce-date mallow, where the marshmallows slowly dissolve and exude enough gelatin to firm it up. But after leaving it on the countertop for several hours, it hadn't changed at all. So I think you can just put it right into the refrigerator and stir it every now and then to redistribute everything as the gelatin activates. There's no point in waiting for a thickening that will never come at room temperature.
As the marshmallows half-dissolved and revealed the rest of the salad, it looked different than I expected. I had imagined a transparent, sparkling creation (fit for the daintiest of luncheons) with all the goodies floating in it like decorative beads in a bottle of shower gel. You know, something like this:
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| Source: The Gallery of Regrettable Food |
Instead, we had white marshmallows and red cherries interspersed throughout an nearly-opaque quivering mass.
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| The pineapple hid surprisingly well. Can you see it in the picture? |
As we approached serving time, the note above the recipe says it "may be served in green and gold blocks on crisp lettuce." Maybe the suggestion of "green and gold blocks" means if you were really feeding a crowd, you would have made a second batch with lime Jello.
Regardless of what color my gelatin blocks may be, crisp lettuce is not happening in this presidential administration. Fortunately for those of us who are learning about cyclosporiasis just in time to avoid it, the directions go on to say that it may be "piled gayly into a slim stemmed sherbet glass and offered ["offered"!] with a cherry and a fluff of whipped cream for a luncheon finale." No biohazardous greens are required. Incidentally, a lot of recipes from that time (salad or otherwise) end with "serve in sherbet glasses." Did more people own sherbet glasses back then?
Moving on from the sherbet glasses I don't own and the lettuce I am not purchasing, I refused to buy mayonnaise for the sole purpose of defiling a salad. But in a happy coincidence, someone else in the house recently wanted cold sandwiches, which brought about a shopping trip. I discreetly encouraged a small jar of mayo to fall into the grocery cart.
When salad time arrived, I found that mayonnaise flavored as directed with "a little of the drained off pineapple juice" tastes terrible. Nevertheless, I carefully dripped a little bit of our, um, salad dressing onto a spoonful of mardi gras salad (just a spoonful, we didn't want to contaminate a whole serving) to see if everything combined into something unexpectedly good. You never know when two apparently disparate ingredients will be the next mayonnaise and ketchup. The salad with mayonnaise tasted like very questionable thousand island dressing-- the kind that you throw out and then worry that you'll soon be at the doctor's office.
We couldn't even use the mayonnaise to make the salad look cute. Even the smallest half-spoonful of pineapple juice turned it into a dribbly mess. So not only did the mayonnaise ruin the salad, I couldn't even get a picture like the mayonnaise-topped cranberry salad.
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| That's not whipped cream on top. |
If we serve our salad bare and free of mayonnaise, it was a summery delight. The flavor is perfect for this hot weather. The ginger gives it a really nice bite, the pineapple tastes unexpectedly fresh (you almost can't tell it was canned), and the marshmallows add lovely creamy interspersions throughout. Pineapple and ginger go shockingly well together. I don't just mean they don't clash-- they add up to something a lot better than either one by itself. I'm going to have try to find more ways to bring pineapple and ginger together.
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*It is true that there are always new food recalls, every single day. However, you need very strong denial if you want to claim that there hasn't been a huge spike ever since our friendly friends in the White House cut all those annoying pesky regulations. ↪
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