National Jell-O Day! Shrimp Surprise Salad

You're not going to believe this one. Even I don't believe it.

My God, what have I done…

July 12th is National Eat Your Jell-O Day! You know we’ve got to celebrate in style. I promised you a part two of savory gelatin salads of yesteryear, and surely I saved the worst for last: the shrimp variation of Chicken Salad Surprise from the 1962 Joys of Jell-O cookbook.

I’m still looking for a savory gelatin salad that I can stomach (in case you missed part one, here’s the tale of woe), but maybe I’ve been going about this the wrong way by choosing things that sound like they might not be as bad as some of the others. Maybe I should just scream “Eye of the Tiger” at the top of my lungs while I shadowbox the most hideous combination of foodstuffs ever assembled on this green earth. This cursed tidbit recipe has to be just the ticket.

Basically, you make cubes of salad fixins in Jell-O, and then toss them in a lettuce-based salad. In case you can’t bear to look at the itemized list, here are the ingredients for the cubes, except for the wine vinegar that I forgot to put on the tray (for the record, I used rice wine vinegar):

As you can see, I chose the mayo version, with lemon flavor Jell-O. As horrifying as this is, thinking about the modifications for the lettuce part of the salad is absolute bone-chilling terror. Torn lettuce, diced tomato, sure sure…and then artichoke hearts and grapefruit.

And olives.

None of those go together, especially with the apple in the cubes. It’s like Fashion Plates mixed with Flip-O-Saurus. We’re going to eat a Twiggy-Triceratops mashup wearing a toga with one go-go boot and a clown wig.

Well, I’m going to eat it. *cries*

Here are all the bits for the cubes chopped up. It looks okay? I wouldn’t faint if I saw it like this in a buffet.

But, it’s the glitch in the matrix that’s the real holy horror. Lemon Jell-O, garlic salt, vinegar, and mayo. As usual, I’m just making a quarter of the recipe, so I weighed out 21 grams of the powder and mixed with 43 grams of boiling water (that’s 1/4 of 3/4 of a cup of water for anyone keeping score). That’s a really low water to gelatin ratio, and it took quite a while to make it dissolve. It was even harder to get the mayo mixed in uniformly.

It was at this point that I started to wonder whether this one might surprise me. There’s more mayo than Jell-O in the matrix. As I checked the recipe again, I realized that there’s no dressing suggested. The lemon probably won’t be very prominent, or the sugar, and things like lemon vinaigrette or honey mustard have some similar flavor notes. I love those. Is it possible this could work?

As it chilled (you can see my setup for quick thickening so that I can keep a close eye for it to reach the proper stage to add tidbits so that they don’t sink), it actually got easier to mix in the mayo — those similar consistencies are your friend.

Once mixed, I put it in this awesome silicone ice cube tray that we keep dedicated for savory sauce freezing lest we get garlic ice. Then, it was just a matter of chilling for a few hours until lunch.

I tossed the green salad components (managed to hold onto my cookies though), and popped the Jell-O cubes out as carefully as I could, but they are very soft as I suspected. And, with little bits in there like this, you’re never going to get a clean slice. For perfect cubes, one would have to set in an oiled tray with cubes already the right size, and maybe freeze for a few minutes just to make sure they came out perfectly.

That tip hardly matters, since there’s no way you are ever, ever going to make this absolute gustatory disaster. This thing belongs in a gelatin cabinet of curiosities, next to the eye of newt relish.

Anyway, here it is again, the minion of Beelzebub, the Queen of the Damned, with her Jell-O and her apple-garlic crustaceans and her grapefruit artichoke olive salad.

Ooops, I did it again…

It’s National Eat Your Jell-O Day, and I’m a patriot to the bone. Down the hatch!

Okay, so…hear me out.

It’s actually not bad. The salad cubes are pretty soft, so they sort of function the way dressing would. The texture ends up a little thicker than something like blue cheese dressing, but it’s in the ballpark. It’s a bit sweet, but nothing more than a raspberry vinaigrette. The apple and celery add a much-needed crunch, and they work well with shrimp. The garlic enhances but does not clash with the Jell-O. The green salad part is not a unified effort, however, at least by modern standards, but it doesn’t taste bad — just unusual. I think I would leave one thing out in the grapefruit-artichoke-olive triad. If you did artichoke, roasted peppers, and olives, it would mesh. You could also do grapefruit, artichokes, and croutons or grated carrot.

Look, I know you’re probably thinking I’ve gone ‘round the bend about now. No one is more surprised than I am. I really thought this would be a disgusting and celebratory slam-dunk, a big NO lit up in sparklers and playing Englebert Humperdink’s “Release Me” on a dented kazoo. I had to go sit on the porch after a couple of bites and stare into space, examining whether I had lost my sense of smell, or perhaps my ever-loving mind.

I haven’t, though. I swear. As a result of this inadvisable experiment, at long last, I think I kind of get what they were going for with the savory Jell-O salad. I hope some people try this one! If you go to a retro dinner party, this would be hilarious, but actually edible, especially if you made one of the substitutions suggested above.

I told you it was a surprise.

Zen and the Science of Candy Corn is a reader-supported publication that brings me great joy. You can literally give me your 2 cents with the tip jar button below!

But if you decided to subscribe, free or paid? That would be such a wonderful surprise!

And please feel free to share this post with any Englebert Humperdink-on-a-kazoo-loving psychopaths you know.