The Joys of Jell-O Recipe #147: Savory Spinach Salad

Howdy, Jigglers! I know it's a bit cliche at this point to bring it up, but with widespread employment loss and quarantine due to coronavirus, I wanted to post a recipe that packs in actual nutrition with minimal, easy-to-find ingredients, so here is Savory Spinach Salad.

I live in a very small town, and it took a while for our grocery stores to show any signs of shortage, but the last time I went, there were very few canned goods and fresh products like dairy, eggs, and fruit. What there was plenty of, however, was canned spinach. I don't think any soul walking around today has a fervent, Popeye-esque love of this vegetable in canned form, but I likewise think that everyone can recognize the nutritional value of these leafy greens in any form, so if shortages are bad in your area, this recipe will actually make them taste like something.

Since I had some frozen spinach on hand, I used that after thawing it and cooking to dry it as much as possible. In place of the Jell-O I used the juice and zest of two large lemons plus unflavored gelatin. The only other thing I changed was the onion. As I've previously mentioned, I have some home-fermented red onions on hand, so I used some of that, finely minced, in place of grated onion. I left in the salt, the vinegar, and the proportions of the ingredients--everything else, in essence, is the same. If you plan on making this salad, please see my recipe notes at the end of this post for some further tweaking recommendations.

This recipe is a snap to make. The only even vaguely difficult part is checking up on the hardening gelatin enough to catch it at the right stage to fold in the vegetables. Gelatin has an uncanny knack of knowing exactly when I'm in a hurry, because whenever I just want to get everything squared away in a mold and on to my next chore, I swear it takes about three times longer for it to set up. At any rate, the Savory Spinach Salad eventually made five salads in my small individual molds, though this depends highly on exactly how much spinach you use.

I know this is not the prettiest recipe--my husband remarked that it looked like I set moss in gelatin and called it a day. But how does it taste? Well, oddly enough, it tastes nothing like spinach. The rest of the ingredients overpower the spinach element entirely. The main flavor is that of acid, and between the lemon juice and the vinegar, it is most similar to sauerkraut in flavor. It is very acidic, to the point that I recommend toning down the lemon juice to the juice of one large lemon or increasing the amount of water by a half cup and increasing the gelatin to match. Even so, you do still get a good hint of onion flavor as well. The whole package is rather refreshing, though the texture definitely has a bit of that stringy processed cooked spinach sensation. As you're chewing, just remember how much Vitamin C you're getting and pretend it actually is sauerkrat and you'll be alright.

As you can see in the recipe, General Foods recommends serving it over lettuce and garnished with mayonnaise and hard-cooked eggs. While I couldn't get ahold of fresh lettuce, I did have mayo and eggs on hand, so I tried it this way, and it is a definite improvement. Both the mayonnaise and the eggs cut down on the acidity and, of course, provide fat and protein, so the whole package winds up being a very filling snack or a light lunch.

I only had the Savory Spinach Salad on hand for four days, but it held up perfectly through all that time. On the whole, this recipe was not as bad as I was expecting, but it wasn't terrific either. If I had plenty of a mild lettuce, though, I would not feel bad about serving it to company as long as I dialed back the lemon juice or vinegar a little and served it with the eggs and mayonnaise. It's not something you will crave, but I can easily commend General Foods for creating a completely virtuous spinach gelatin salad that isn't terrible.
 

The Joys of Jell-O Recipe #118: Ginger-Upper

Howdy, Jigglers! Today I bring you a Two-Way Salad recipe that I was very excited for because it stars one of my favorite flavors in all the world: ginger. Enter the Ginger-Upper, a fruity salad dessert with ginger ale, lemon juice, and pears. Okay, maybe I shouldn't be so hard on the categorization of this recipe, because I guess you could serve this as a salad on lettuce and it would be fine with some flavors of Jell-O, but if you make this with strawberry, cherry, or any flavor that includes banana, this will instantly turn into a dessert dessert, guaranteed.

In my case, I thought the citrus and ginger flavors would go great with orange, while still maintaining a semblance of salad-ness, so I used the juice and zest of three Valencia oranges and unflavored gelatin in place of the Jell-O and some of the water. Other than that and adding a bit of lemon zest for good measure, I made this recipe exactly as written.

Last time I made a Jell-O recipe with fresh pears, I used some pears at the peak of ripeness, and they turned brown pretty quickly. So I used this recipe as an opportunity to experiment with fresh pears that were still just slightly hard but not astringent, peel and all.

I really liked how much color the orange juice imparted to this mold, and let me tell you, adding zest contributes a whole new dimension of flavor to citrus gelatin flavored with real juice. The contrast of the green pears looked very nice, too. Tastewise, with the addition of the ginger ale and orange juice, this mold had all the sweetness it needed, and the pears tasted ripe within a day or so. On the whole, this dish was a fresh and tasty salad that was...sadly lacking in gingery zing for a recipe with "ginger" as the first word in the title.

Granted, ginger ale normally has a subdued ginger taste, but it is just barely noticeable mixed with all the citrus and pears, and if you were to used boxed Jell-O, it would be even less apparent. Thus, I recommend that if you want this to have more of a punchy ginger taste, you ought to use ginger beer instead of ginger ale or add a tablespoon or two of grated fresh ginger into the mix. That should do the trick. 

The Ginger-Upper held up fairly well in storage, though within three days the pears got slightly brown around the edges of the peel, but that was certainly an improvement over the other time I used fresh pears. Overall, I was quite pleased with how this turned out. It made a good side dish, but I was disappointed with the lack of convincing ginger flavor. With my recommended adjustments, it should turn out much zippier. To be fair, though, I understand that in 1964 it was probably harder to find fresh ginger or ginger beer, so I can excuse General Foods's use of ginger ale. I just can't excuse their insistence on boasting so much about how gingery this is when, in fact, it isn't.

The Joys of Jell-O Recipe #159: Minted Pineapple

Howdy, Jigglers! Today we are going to take a look at one of the recipes in JOJ that is specifically designed to be molded in a can. 

This concept is one of several introduced in the book that make me think "Well, you could do this, but I don't know why that would make you think that you should." While, yes, tin cans are easy to find and will mold your Jell-O into a shape, it will be immediately obvious to the casual observer that the mold is can-shaped, which is about the cheapest-looking presentation I can possibly imagine. In addition, it will be fiddly to cut neatly due to having a rounded bottom, and furthermore most of these recipes do not fit in a can, so you have to make a can mold plus an individual mold or something along those lines, which is a little awkward.

In any case, the recipe had to be made, and I had some canned pineapple on hand, so here is Minted Pineapple. The recipe makes it out to be a relish-type side salad to be served alongside "hearty meats."

To make this recipe the best it could be, I subsistuted the juice of half a lime, one drop of green food coloring, and unflavored gelatin for the Jell-O. I also used the juice from the pineapple can in place of some of the water. Other than that, I followed the recipe to the letter, though you will notice that the pineapple I had on hand was in chunk form and not crushed form, so the texture was slightly different but otherwise the dish was the same. I also chose to make this in a serving bowl for aforementioned reasons. There will come a time when I will mold a Jell-O recipe in a can just to see how it works, but I was too lazy to do so this time. But for those of you who are just dying to see Minted Pineapple molded in a can, here is this photo from the book:

I feel as though, when the General Foods photographers were setting up this shot, they asked "What exactly would be an appropriate garnish for this recipe?" After a few minutes of racking their brains, they came to the conclusion of "We have to pick something just to get this shoot over with--somebody go grab some parsley!" Anyhow, this recipe was very simple to make, and it turned out fairly attractive, and it wound up smelling just slighly of mint. Thankfully, no trace of vinegar could be distinguished.

The taste of this odd combination of ingredients was surprisingly harmonious. The vinegar gets lost in the general tanginess of the pineapple and lime, which is offset by the pineapple's sweetness and the sweet overtone of mint. Despite the inclusion of salt and vinegar, this recipe easily falls into the growing category of savory Jell-O that isn't. If you blindfolded a hundred people that you found walking down the street, had them taste this dish, and asked them what kind of a dish it was, all of them would tell you that it's a fruity dessert. It isn't overpoweringly sweet, but it is a sweet dish.

...Which brings me to my next question I wish I could ask of the General Foods gremlins: what sort of meat was intended to be accompanied by this? If it were just pineapple and lime, I would say Hawaiian-style ham, and if it were just lime and mint I would say pork or lamb roast, but it's all of that. At the end of the day I guess this would work best alongside chicken or potentially white fish, but only because their flavors are so mild. Ironically, these are about the least "hearty" meats I know, but this would definitely not go well with any red meats.

Despite Minted Pineapple's failure as a salad or a relish, I liked it quite a bit on its own. I did not expect mint and pineapple to go well together, but I was wrong. The overall flavor of the recipe was well balanced, too, and it exceeded at one of the nicest abilities of gelatin, which is to make you feel like you are eating something substantial that is, in all reality, very light. It would certainly be nice as a light, fruity dessert at a summer barbeque or any similarly warm occasion.

Though misguided and miscategorized, Minted Pineapple is a tasty and unique variation on the Jell-O theme that I would certainly make again, just not in a can.

The Joys of Jell-O Recipe #43: Ribbon Loaf

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.

The Joys of Jell-O Recipe #141: Coollime Salad

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.

The Joys of Jell-O Recipe #104: Banana Peanut Salad

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.

 

The Joys of Jell-O Recipe #102: De Luxe Cheese Mold

Howdy, Jigglers! To continue our cheesy Jell-O marathon we have the De Luxe Cheese Mold. Before we begin, can I just say that I love spelling "deluxe" out as two words and capitalizing both of them? It makes you feel like you're hanging out with the Rat Pack just reading it.

Anyhow, the De Luxe Cheese Mold is deceptively not that cheesy. It is mostly fruit flavoring in the form of canned pineapple and sherbet with a sprinkle of cottage cheese included for filling power, a savory contrast, and so that General Foods could class this recipe as a "Two-Way Salad." If we are being totally honest, though, this is a fruit salad-type dessert.

Tragically, there is seemingly not a single pint of orange sherbet in a 100-mile radius of where I live, so I used lime sherbet. To replace the Orange-Pineapple Jell-O, I used one cup of orange juice in place of the boiling water, the syrup from the canned pineapple, and unflavored gelatin. I also used separate cottage cheese and pineapple, since a mixture of the two also does not seem to be available in my area. So I ended up with a mixed citrus gelatin salad. Other than those changes, though, I made the recipe as written.

When it was done, I ended up with a one-quart mold of gelatin plus an extra quarter cup. I used my nice fish mold for it to see how well it would conform to its shape, and I was pleasantly surprised by this relatively chunky recipe.

I was terrified that, considering the mixture of lime sherbet and orange juice, the gelatin would turn out an unappetizing beige color, but fortunately the power of food coloring prevailed and it turned out just plain green. In terms of taste, it is very reminiscent of the classic lime Jell-O salad with cottage cheese, pineapple, pecans, and sweetened condensed milk, only sans nuts and more spongy instead of creamy. Even without the additional sugar that actual Jell-O would provide, it was still plenty sweet, too.

 

 
In general the taste of the De Luxe Cheese mold was nice. It's fruity and tropical, and the cheese is nice in it, which I wasn't really expecting. I certainly couldn't imagine eating it on lettuce, though. If simply reading the recipe didn't convince you that this recipe is a total cop-out of a salad, I can confirm by having tasted it: it is just a cop-out of a salad. But if you need a somewhat lighter fruity gelatin salad than usual, this will definitely fit the bill.