Recipes from Cooking with Doyle Moore on Focus 580
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Cooking on Focus 580
January 7, 2009: Congealed Salads
When you hear the phrase “congealed salad,” you might have one of two reactions: gee, I haven’t had that in a long time; or, what the heck is that? Doyle feels that it’s something that is a candidate for revival.
During the holidays Doyle went to a dinner where there were two congealed salads served. He felt they really complemented the rest of the meal better than a leafy green salad would have. They were very complex salads, not just bing cherries and cubes of cheese in a dark purple base, but a nice taste, an amalgamation. Why don’t we do it more in the winter? He remembers being confused by Jell-O salads as a child: to them, Jell-O was Jell-O, a dessert eaten with cream poured on it. But then someone suggested pouring mayonnaise on the Jell-O, and tarting up funny little salads with it, but he could never quite get to that. And he has been suspicious of “Jell-O” that doesn’t have any color or flavoring, and that is one of the major contributions of congealed salad. You can’t really call it “Jell-O salad,” because the gelatin used is usually not Jell-O brand. Congealed salad can be made with either unflavored or flavored gelatin. Anyway, at the dinner table, Doyle ended the dinner with a toast to 2009 for “more congealed salads.”
It was very hard to find any examples in cookbooks, though, even in the Jell-O Cookbook. And in Craig Claiborne’s big thick Craig Claiborne’s Southern Cooking, he has just one recipe, his mother’s 1930s party salad. So the idea of putting things into what had been an available gelatin dessert dates back to the 1930s. Knox Gelatin had been around for a very long time before Jell-O; and before that cooks extracted gelatin from calves’ feet. Gelatins were used very much in preparing other foods, aspics and such, but when it became commercially available, it was readily used.
A caller from Spring Bay was interested in how long congealed salads have been around. She got out her oldest cookbook, Hood’s Practical Cook’s Book, ©1897. There are about ten gelatin salad recipes in that book. The gelatin that they use is from a box; they talk about soaking it in water and then pouring the water off. So these salads have been around from at least the 1890s.
David finds on Wikipedia that gelatin had been popular for a very long time during the Victorian era. The problem was that it was sold in sheets and had to be “purified,” which took a lot of time. The first patent for powdered gelatin was issued in 1845; Jell-O has been around since 1897.
The Junior League of Monroe, Louisiana put out a Cotton Country Collection cookbook (available at this URL: http://www.jlmonroe.org/monroe/npo.jsp?pg=store&category=504) that is a mainstay of all southern cooks, and it has about 35 recipes for various gelatin salads.
UTAH’S FAMOUS GREEN JELL-O SALAD
Doyle doesn’t know the origins of this, but Utah considers itself the Jell-O State, and they have “green Jell-O day.”
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1 cup water
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1 6-oz. package of lime gelatin
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½ cup sugar
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2 Tbsp. fresh lemon juice
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1 cup crushed pineapple
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2 cups whipping cream
Boil the water and add the gelatin and sugar; stir until the gelatin is dissolved. Add the lemon juice. Stir in the pineapple. Refrigerate until syrupy. Whip the whipping cream until it’s stiff, and fold it in. Place the mixture in a 9 x 13 pan and refrigerate for several hours.
One of the reasons some people may not like this kind of dish is that you’ve got all this stuff floating. You can avoid that by mixing everything, let it start to chill and set (until “syrupy”), and then mix it again so that the solids don’t float but get evenly mixed inside the gelatin.
So this dish is somewhat complex in that you have to plan ahead, you can’t just whip it up for lunch. There is also controversy between clear gelatin and “cloudy,” using cream or cool whip or even sour cream. Does adding the cream change the consistency of the product? It’s still the consistency of Jell-O, just cloudy instead of clear.
A caller from St. Joseph remembers from his childhood using orange flavored Jell-O, and then grating carrots and celery and mandarin oranges into it; and you could cover it with miniature marshmallows. Put a dab of mayonnaise on it in squares, and serve it on a plate. It’s so out of vogue now, but he thinks it’s wonderful.
TOMATO ASPIC
A caller from Champaign claims that the great-granddaddy of all congealed salads appears to be tomato aspic. His mother, who was a hostess in Washington, made a wonderful one.
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1 can Campbell’s tomato soup
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2 small packages Philadelphia cream cheese
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2 Tbsp. Knox gelatin dissolved in ½ cup cold water
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1 cup Kraft mayonnaise
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1 small bottle of stuffed green olives (sliced)
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1 ½ cup chopped celery (chopped fine)
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¼ cup onion (chopped very fine)
Bring the tomato soup to a boil and add the cream cheese (broken up into cubes). Keep on a low fire until all the cheese is dissolved. Remove from the fire and stir in the gelatin that was previously dissolved in the cold water. Start to cool it. When partially cooled, add the mayonnaise, chopped vegetables and olives. Cool for several hours. Cut it in small squares and serve on lettuce.
When you had your little cube of aspic, there would be pieces of pimento, olives, and celery sticking out of it, it was terrific, very mellow. This recipe is in The Congressional Cookbook, she contributed it.
[His mother also ate Knox gelatin plain, she said it was good for the fingernails.]
CORNED BEEF ASPIC SALAD
A caller from Terre Haute found the tomato aspic recipe brought back memories. She went to her files and found her mother’s wonderful Corned Beef Aspic Salad. It is very similar to the previous caller’s tomato aspic, except that you add ½ to 1 cup of canned corned beef (you just kind of break up the pieces of beef).
1 envelope of Knox gelatin, dissolved in ¼ cup cold water
1½ cups of hot tomato juice
1 cup mayonnaise
½ tsp. salt
1 tsp. lemon juice
1 Tbsp or more of minced onion
3 hard boiled chopped eggs
1½ cups of chopped celery
½ to 1 cup canned corned beef.
This makes a wonderful luncheon salad. It is a light pink, dressy luncheon salad. You can pour it into a 1½ quart mold or a 13 x 9 pan and cut it into squares.
FESTIVE CHRISTMAS MOLD
A caller from Urbana’s family has a nice traditional family recipe that the mother of her brother-in-law would serve. It’s molded in a Christmas-tree cake mold. She doesn’t have the exact recipe, but her brother-in-law says it includes lime Jell-O, cream cheese, whipped cream (she would substitute yogurt for the cream cheese and whipped cream), pecans and chopped celery, and maybe also cherries. It was very festive and looked really pretty. You’re not supposed to see chunks of white from the cream cheese, somehow she got it merged in [ed. note: perhaps by melting as in the tomato aspic recipe?]. She doesn’t know what proportions of ingredients were used. Doyle suggests you experiment to your liking; if the gelatin isn’t strong enough to carry everything you add, then add more gelatin.
When Doyle was a house boy at a fraternity in Manhattan, KN, around 1952, he invented the following Jell-O salad. He took lime Jell-O and added fruit cocktail, and then used the paper cone cups as molds. Then, when inverted and unmolded, the gelatin took on the look of Christmas trees.
A SWEET JELL-O DESSERT
The Urbana caller has another family recipe, a dessert that uses evaporated skim milk. You put the can of evaporated milk in the refrigerator until it’s very cold, and then you whip it with sugar, and it whips up to be like whipped cream but much lower in fat. Mix it in with Jell-O that is about ready to congeal but not quite.
EGGNOG RING SALAD
Another caller from Urbana also has a sweet family recipe called “eggnog ring salad,” a tradition for their Christmas Eve dinner which is a smorgasbord with Swedish meatballs and all the rest.
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1 package lemon Jell-O dissolved in 1 cup boiling water
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¼ cup cold water
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¼ tsp. rum extract
Measure ¾ cup of this liquid and add ¾ cup eggnog to it. Pour the mixture into a ring mold and chill until firm but not completely set.
In the meantime take
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a can of pear halves
and drain the fruit, saving ¾ cup of the juice. Dissolve
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1 package raspberry Jell-O in
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1 cup boiling water
Add the measured pear juice and chill until it is a little thickened, then add the cut up pears. Spoon this mixture over the eggnog ring. Chill the entire thing, and it comes out as a two-layer salad, with the eggnog flavor on the top and the raspberry/pear flavor on the bottom. And it looks very pretty.
PRETZEL JELL-O SALAD
A caller from Savoy knows a spectacular recipe for “Pretzel Jell-O Salad.” You start out with crushed pretzels, butter, and sugar which you cook into your crust. You place a layer of cream cheese mixed with sugar in the crust, then top it with a layer of strawberries (or raspberries) mixed into strawberry (or raspberry) Jell-O; then top that with whipped cream or Cool Whip. It can be a dessert or a side dish.
A complete recipe can be found at this site: http://www.cooks.com/rec/view/0,1843,155165-244201,00.html
The little bit of salt in the pretzels combines with the sweetness of the other ingredients, and perhaps some tartness in the fruit, for a wonderful overall taste. You can also use pineapple and whatever flavor of Jell-O you have on the shelf instead of raspberries or strawberries.
NO-BAKE CHEESECAKE
A caller from Champaign has a dessert recipe, a no-bake cheesecake that she got from the Champaign-Urbana Courier in 1977 when she first moved here. It uses whipped milk and was originally a Milnot recipe; Milnot is a brand of evaporated milk in which they have removed the butterfat and replaced it with vegetable fat. [You can find the Milnot recipe at this site: http://www.milnot.com/desserts/milnot_cheese_cake_no_bake.htm]
What she has done instead is to whip no-fat powdered milk. It is important to start with very cold water.
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½ cup cold water
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juice of half a lemon (2 Tbsp.?) (optional)
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¾ cup dry milk powder
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2 Tbsp sugar (she uses vanilla sugar)
Sprinkle the milk powder over the liquid and beat well. It won’t get hard at that point, but chill it in the freezer; when it is chilled but not frozen, take it out of the freezer, add the sugar, and whip it again. Then you can flavor it (especially if you haven’t added the lemon juice) with cocoa, cinnamon, nutmeg, or ginger, to taste.
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1 3-oz. package of lemon (or lime or orange) Jell-O
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1 cup boiling water
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8-9 oz. light cream cheese
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½ cup sugar
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1 tsp. vanilla (or half vanilla sugar and half regular sugar; good for people who are sensitive to gluten and want to avoid the grain alcohol in vanilla extract; vanilla sugar is just a container of sugar with a vanilla bean in it, the sugar takes on the flavor of the vanilla)
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Whipped milk as above
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3 cups Graham cracker crumbs
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½ cup margarine, melted; (or you can use a pre-made Graham cracker crust) (she just lines an 8x8 Tupperware container with Graham cracker crumbs, and skips the butter or margarine)
Dissolve the Jell-O in the boiling water; chill it slightly, but don’t let it get too thick, you want it syrupy but not chunky. Cream the cream cheese, sugar, and vanilla; then add the thickened Jell-O and blend; then fold in your whipped milk. Pour over whatever you are using as a crust and put it in the fridge. You can even use diet Jell-O and non-fat cream cheese, and it still works.
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