December Daily 2022 MEGAAA thread

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.

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.