Food of Yore: Pretzel salad with Jell-O and Cool Whip a throwback to a bygone era
Imagine an array of baked beans, marshmallows, fruit cocktail, flavored gelatin, grated American cheese, ginger ale, sauerkraut … Do the words “salad fixings” spring to mind?
Probably not, but then again, you aren’t a well-bred, middle-class lady living at the turn of the 20th century, or in 1920, or even in 1954. Had you been reared on the tenets of the domestic science movement that dominated American cooking in the first half of the 20th century, such a list would indeed have suggested salad. As a “progressive housekeeper,” you would have cringed at the very idea of what we call salad today: raw vegetables tossed together.
To the early 20th-century homemaker, such a haphazard arrangement smacked of crudity. As culinary historian Laura Shapiro has detailed in “Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century,” vegetables had to be tamed — boiled to death, smothered in thick white sauce, or, in the case of “salads,” confined in dainty asparagus stalk “wheels” and pineapple ring borders. The very best way to render untidy raw vegetables harmless was to encase them in gelatin.
Fortunately, home cooks no longer needed to simmer, strain and skim calves’ feet to make it, nor even purify sheet gelatin. The early 20th-century salad maker need only have reached for commercial powdered gelatin. Then, after molding and chilling her salad, she could gild the lily with a few stuffed prunes, rolled cottage cheese balls, rococo swirls of thinned mayonnaise and a carved tomato tulip.
Pretzel Salad is a direct descendent of such “Festive for Special Occasions Salads,” as “Betty Crocker’s New Picture Cookbook” grouped similar concoctions as late as 1961. And even today, despite the Cool Whip and the strawberry Jell-O, Pretzel Salad is not called a dessert — it’s a salad.
Chow Town readers can get the recipe for Pretzel Salad and an accompanying video free until April 28 at bit.ly/ctpretzel.
This story was originally published April 21, 2015 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Food of Yore: Pretzel salad with Jell-O and Cool Whip a throwback to a bygone era."