“Health Salad”

My friends in my Facebook group and I have been undertaking a Jello Salad Cookoff consisting of making recipes from various Southern church cookbooks from the 1920s-1950s. This was my contribution, a recipe from 1923 called “Health Salad”. It is essentially a recipe for cole slaw (cabbage, carrots, celery and green pepper, with mayonnaise) held together with lemon Jello. I spent a chunk of my Sunday afternoon putting it together, let it chill overnight, and then my wife and I ate some for dinner last night.

In the realm of weird things that go into Jello salads, this one is very tame. The friend who provided the recipes has a number of these old community cookbooks that her mother and grandmother collected, and I’d say fewer than half are suited to modern tastes. My friend Tony’s recipe was a cucumber-cream cheese-lime Jello concoction that turned out in an alarming shade of green, but he reports it was also edible. Still waiting to see what others come up with.

To be honest, I was surprised this actually gelled up a well as it did, because as I was adding the shredded veggies to the gelatin, I was sure it would not. We shot a little video of the unmolding, but my WordPress plan doesn’t let me post videos. Cutting into it to serve, it lost all structural integrity and reverted back to being your aveage scoop of cole slaw on the plate. It tasted just fine, with only the slightest of lemon flavor in the background and a barely detectable textural note of gelatin. I’m not a big fan of cole slaw in the first place, but my wife loves it, and we agreed we would eat the rest of the salad.