Howdy, Jigglers! Sometimes in life, you just want a simple-to-prepare burst of sugary goodness in your life, but you want a treat that's just a little different. Enter the Ribbon Loaf, General Foods's go-to bridge party snack to please the relentlessly novelty-seeking palates of the bridge crowd with a very easy recipe.
That's right: you don't even have to touch a stove to create this layered cake of gelatin goodness. Since I wanted to make the Ribbon Loaf in the simplest way possible, I made it as written, using boxed Jell-O and everything, except I used real heavy cream instead of Dream Whip because it is just as easy if not easier to do it the real way. For some reason I couldn't find non-sugar-free lime Jell-O, so I used the sugar-free kind with a couple of teaspoons of sugar added, mostly for bulk but partly for maximum "burst of sugary goodness" points.
Now, though this recipe takes very little time and effort to make, it does take a little attention to detail. The applesauce-gelatin mixtures are fairly thin-textured if using storebought applesauce, so you need to spread it on the graham crackers carefully to avoid it glooping down the sides and generally getting all over the place.While all this is going on, you also have to be conscious of keeping the cracker stack even so you don't end up with a Leaning Ribbon Loaf. You can adjust it as you go, though mine did end up just slightly askew, but it was to such a small degree that no one would ever notice.
Then, once the full stack is formed (which actually required a few more graham crackers than those called for in the recipe), spreading whipped cream onto that applesauce mixture takes a little finesse, especially if you want to avoid any Jell-O coloration from showing from the outside of the loaf. I mostly succeeded in this, but there was one small patch of red that was visible from one side. Oh well.
The other detail that took a little doing, though, again, it's minimal as this recipe is trivially easy to make, was how does one sprinkle sliced almonds on the vertical sides of anything? I couldn't rightly figure out this conundrum, so, as you can see, I just studded the sides with the nuts and called it a day.
Once I had the finished product, it was evident right away that this certainly would be a fun dish to serve to group of unsuspecting friends. From the outside it looks like a fairly formal, if petite, cake. Then you cut into it and it's like BAM:
Color! Contrast! Drama! Jell-O! For how easy it is to assemble, it is on the impressive side. The taste is quite nice, as well. The intense fruitiness of so much Jell-O mixed into so little applesauce is balanced appropriately by the thick whipped cream on the sides, and the Jell-O soaks into the graham crackers to create a cakey texture. One note, though: if you refrigerate the loaf for only thirty minutes, as the recipe suggests, you will still have a bit of crunch in your crackers. If you want it to truly be cakelike before serving, I suggest waiting an hour or more. If you need to make it well ahead of time, that's fine, too: my Ribbon Loaf stayed perfectly nice and beautiful for five full days.
I imagine that the Jell-O flavors could be switched around at will successfully. The lime and raspberry are nice together, but any Jell-O flavor would go well with the applesauce, as well as with any other Jell-O flavor. As is the recipe looks very Christmas-y, but other flavors could be used for a given holiday or occasion (school colors, for instance), as the colors do stay separated and vibrant. This dish would also be extra creamy and delectable with a Jell-O pudding mix as one or both of the filling flavors, I bet. Ooh, imagine pistachio and vanilla or chocolate and banana (with the bananas chopped very finely if using, of course)! I might just have to try one of those in the future because that sounds great.
If you can't tell already, I very much enjoyed the Ribbon Loaf, from its ease of construction to the end result. It's sweet, festive, eye-catching, and even well suited to making with small children (I mean helping in the preparation, not as a side dish!). General Foods did a wonderful job on designing this recipe to create a Jell-O treat that is just different enough to be interesting but not weird.
Howdy Jigglers! Today we are going to discuss the Coollime Salad, perhaps one of the most dreaded recipes of this whole project. I honestly just made it because it featured several inexpensive ingredients that I needed for other dishes, plus I wanted to get it over with.
When I was looking over the recipe before making it, I just buckled down and decided that it had to be done straight. There were no alterations that I could make that would in any substantial way improve what I was about to produce. The only possible modification was using lime juice, one drop of green food coloring, and unflavored gelatin in place of lime Jell-O to avoid the sugary vinegar taste, which I did. I don't know why they couldn't have used the celery-flavored Jell-O for this since they were promoting it so much at the time, but that question has been relegated to the ages.
Since I had them on hand, and since this recipe already has a green-and-pink vibe to it, I decided to use home-fermented pickled red onions in place of raw onions, as I still cannot get over the idea of raw onion in a Jell-O salad.
Other than those two minor changes, I made the recipe as written. It came out smelling awful, but looking...pretty decent. Like something that would adorn a tastefully arranged Easter table.
Now, the taste of this salad is different. It has a lot of competing elements to it: the spice of horseradish, radishes, and paprika, with the creaminess of cream cheese and milk, the tartness of lime and vinegar, and the crunch of the vegetables. All told the flavor is FAR better than what I was expecting. I was anticipating having to force myself to eat it, in fact, but I enjoyed it as a side at lunch each day. It is primarily sour and salty, but each component gives enough contrast to form a nice, refreshing whole. The horseradish in the mix was especially good: this might be my favorite application of horseradish outside of big, meaty roast beef sandwiches.
If I had to compare the Coollime Salad to something, it's sort of like a slippery-smooth German potato salad with plenty of mustard, but creamier.
What does strike me as particularly odd about eating it is that, unlike some of these excuses for salads like the Banana-Peanut Salad (which is a salad in name only because of how much fruit and sugar is in it), this salad is mostly dairy, which is a phenomenon I've never encountered in a salad before. But it's true. The buttermilk and the cottage cheese form probably 60-70% of this entire salad, and it feels like there is a paltry quantity of vegetables included, even though I did add a little extra celery since I had chopped up too much. Really, though--that's probably the only thing I would change about this recipe: double the amount of radishes, celery, and onion (if using pickled onions), or add half a cup of little cucumber sticks, as hinted at in the recipe notes. That would make it feel more justifiable as a salad, and plus, if you use a Bundt pan as a mold like I did, the additional bulk would help create a more impressively statured salad. Otherwise, the salad is pretty nice as it is.
As with so many Jell-O recipes, I have a few notes on serving the Coollime Salad, should you ever decide to take my word for how palatable it is. Firstly, though the recipe does not mention it, I do recommend serving slices of the salad on top of lettuce, especially a mild lettuce like iceberg, Romaine, or Bibb. This would help moderate the pungency of the tart elements of the salad, making it more pleasing to more palates.
Secondly, I recommend serving this for a luncheon among friends, family get-together, church picnic, or any other event where you need a cool vegetable side dish for a large group. Though this recipe keeps very well (mine stayed perfectly good for an entire week in the refrigerator), the color of the radishes and onions (again, if using red onions) bleeds heavily into the gelatin matrix. Unless you are going for a tie-dye aesthetic, the salad looks prettier within a day and a half of unmolding it for this reason.
The Coollime Salad was a refreshingly edible Jell-O creation, and it gave me renewed confidence to tackle some of the other questionable recipes in my Joys of Jell-O journey. So thanks, General Foods, for at least making a nominal effort to prove that you all didn't go completely off the deep end trying to fill up this book.
Howdy Jigglers! Today I bring you a recipe that was easily on my top 10 list of scariest recipes from The Joys of Jell-O: The Banana Peanut Salad. Replete with mayonnaise, layering gelatin, and yes, honest-to-goodness roasted salted peanuts, this recipe had just about everything that is difficult about making retro Jell-O. Yet, as so often happens, I chose to make this recipe because the few necessary ingredients are super cheap and easy to find, which at least gave me some confidence as I knew it wouldn't be a tragic waste of money if it turned out as horrible as it sounded.
If anyone out there has any idea, I need to know: how did they come up with this?
Given that there is already so much going on with this recipe, and especially given that banana can be a challenging flavor to match and pair, I decided to go with boxed Jell-O for this occasion, specifically the strawberry-banana flavor. I don't know about you, but I cannot imagine much that is less appetizing than lime or orange and peanuts. So for once I made this recipe exactly as written.
It is a good idea to serve this in individual molds as indicated in the recipe since peanuts don't slice that easily, but using my particular individual ring molds was the only part of this recipe that wasn't dead simple. It took quite a bit of chopping to get the banana pieces small enough to fit in the molds, which of course makes oxidation more of an issue. However, I chopped the banana immediately prior to dunking it in the clear gelatin, minimizing this problem.
Unless you want to be a perfectionist and break out a blender or whisk for this dish, there will be a few globs of mayo that don't mix in well with the reserved gelatin. Take heart, though--it won't impact the final look or taste of this dessert whatsoever. Yes, this recipe is in the "Two-Way Salads" chapter. No, I won't dignify that travesty by calling it a salad. This is obviously just a dessert recipe, albeit a strange one.
Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties, the photos in this post are all from my phone. My sincerest apologies.
To be utterly honest, this dish doesn't look great. The nearly fluorescent red and pink gelatin makes the chunks held within seem a little less benign, and strawberry-banana Jell-O stinks when it's cooking and setting, so I started off with a very bad feeling about how the taste would turn out. To my total surprise, this tastes...fine. Good, even. It's sweet, but the peanuts add a savory, crunchy contrast that actually works, and the mayonnaise further tempers the saccharine nature of the Jell-O. The strawberry-banana flavor wasn't even too overpowering or artificial-tasting. I was shocked, but pleasantly shocked.
I still can't imagine this in one of the citrusy variations, though.
There's just one warning I have to make about the Banana Peanut Salad for those who wish to try it: despite gelatin's amazing preservative powers, the banana will start to oxidize around the edges and the peanuts will become slightly soggy after roughly a day and a half after making the recipe. I strongly recommend consuming the entire recipe's worth of gelatin either the day it's made or, at most, by the following day. This does create a slight paradox, though: this recipe is one of the most important ones to serve to a sizeable group of people all at once, yet it is one of the recipes that would be most difficult to convince a sizeable group of people to eat all at once. How you reconcile this conundrum is beyond the scope of this post, but I thought it needed to be said regardless.
Despite having enjoyed this "salad," I could not tell you what its most appropriate setting or manner of serving would be, except perhaps to say that this is a dessert that will easily make six servings for under $5 of ingredients if you already have mayonnaise on hand, which is not an unimportant merit. If for no other reason, I give General Foods kudos for creating a "salad" that tastes alright on a very tight budget.
As a hint of what's to come, the next recipe I do will be one that might be even stranger than the Banana Peanut Salad.
