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.
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