Dear readers, I’m sure you are getting ready, as am I, for a holiday full of turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes. But let’s not forget about Thanksgiving’s most maligned side dish, the jello salad. Probably not eaten at Plymouth Rock, but neither were those bubbling casseroles of yams topped with marshmallows, the jello salad is worthy of inclusion in this festive meal. Here’s a post from 2005, detailing one unique variety of the dish. Happy Thanksgiving!
I am a Thanksgiving traditionalist. I don’t like anything fantastical at my feasts, and I come from a long line of traditionalists. Parsnip-Potato Puree may be scrumptious any other day of the year, but on Turkey Day it has to be pure– Russet Potatoes mashed with milk and butter and slathered in homemade turkey gravy. For me a ginger-lime rub on the turkey would be sacrilege, I’ll take butter anyday, and I’m getting racy if I add some bourbon to the sweet potatoes. For one day a year I forget about haute cuisine, and it’s true Americana at my house.
But this year I borrowed from another family’s tradition and made the weird and wonderful Layered Raspberry Jello Salad. Salty, sweet, and pungent, this is a bizarre trio of flavors– raspberry jello with whole raspberries, Cool Whip, mixed with cream cheese, all plunked on top of a crust of salted, crushed pretzel sticks and butter. Mmmm.
First let me say, I am not one of those people who is ga-ga for jello. It all seems a little strange to me; a clear concoction of sweetened fruit is an alien invention– just eat a piece of fruit. Mixing the cream cheese with the confectioner’s sugar, and blending it with the whipped topping, made my stomach turn, but the layering process was a thing of beauty. Neatly wedged into a clear Pyrex baking dish, then plunked in the refrigerator to set, this quivering mass of white trash goodness came out only hours later and made me giggle with glee. The holiday season had arrived!
What makes this “salad” even more of an anomaly, is that the recipe doesn’t even come from a typical American family. My sister had a roommate in college who was first generation American, much of her family is still in Italy, and scattered around the world. They had a huge Thanksgiving feast, replete with an American-style turkey, and many Italian side dishes. They always ate early in the day, and my sister and I would stop by to wish them a happy Thanksgiving before our own feast began. We would bring some fudge that my mother had made the night before, and in return we would get a plate of Italian cookies, and a little dish of Raspberry Layer Salad for my sister and I to share. We loved the stuff!
Those Thanksgivings have passed. It had been years since I had tasted the jello salad, but I thought of it each November, as I was buying up my yams, and sorting through mounds of brussel sprouts. So this year I decided to make it, and it was almost as good as I remembered. It was a little too strange for some people at our Thanksgiving dinner, and that’s fine. They don’t know what they are missing.
