The holidays are a great time to break out traditional family gelatin mold recipes. Nothing says “festive as heck” as colorful gelatin molded into a happy shape with things suspended in it. Look in any heirloom recipe box and there are bound to be recipes clipped from magazines that call for Jello and an assortment of fruits and vegetables. Although they are delicious all the year through, gelatin molds are as essential to Thanksgiving as canned jellied cranberry sauce presented in a dish with the rings intact. (Don’t start with me, everyone knows that’s how it must be served for best taste.)
The Trinity Church Cook Book (1991, Northborough, MA) has a robust range of community-submitted gelatin mold recipes for salads, relishes and desserts. There’s no time like now to showcase a few of the interesting ones. Fair warning, we haven’t tested these recipes, but our theory is that no one submits a bad recipe to a community cookbook.
Bing Cherry Jello salads are a personal favorite. My mother used to make one with cherry Jello and frozen bing cherries when we had fancy company for dinner that was the stuff of dreams. But this one sounds interesting too. Our fruit preference would be for bing cherries and we’d use the cherry juice and perhaps some cranberry juice added in as the “fruit juice.” Adding Coke, a nectar of the gods, is brilliant. And imagine this with walnuts as the “chopped nuts.” We are skeptical about using lime jello, if only because we think the color might be unholy.
Of course there have to be cranberry recipes. These two are both somewhat traditional but they also have subtle differences. Both have the acid of lemon with chopped apples and diced celery and chopped nut meats (our preference would be to chop all of these nice and small).
The title of this recipe is so bold. “Jello Mold,” indicating it is the one and true molded gelatin recipe for this family. It’s an interesting take on cranberry, with nuts and celery, but also with sour cream. This sounds like it could be a creamy delight and might make the Thanksgiving list at our house this year. We are very liberal when it comes to how many cranberry-based recipes can be on the table.
We are Beet Gelatin Salad curious. Pickled beets and Harvard beets are delicious. This sounds like it would be somewhere in between the two. The grated onions would add an interesting texture.
We finish with the Mystery Salad because it has interesting ingredients and can be served as either a salad or a dessert. It’s kind of impossible to imagine what this actually tastes like. I’ve never mixed pineapple and horseradish, let alone mixed them with Jello and nuts. It’s delightful that you whip the whole thing up with a mixer. Finally, it’s cut into squares to serve, imagine how lovely this would look on a salad place, positioned attractively on leaf of iceberg lettuce. It’s pretty obvious why it’s called Mystery Salad, but it sounds like an intriguing mystery that should be solved.
What are your favorite molded gelatin memories?
