Talk About Good: Sunday Vintage Recipe Roulette with Mountain Dew Salad

This nuclear neon gelatin, pudding and soda conglomeration is a real Dew-sie

An imposing mountain of Mount Doom…I mean, Mountain Dew Salad

In case you missed the first installment, this is the second in a series of Vintage Recipe Roulette reviews using only recipes from Talk About Good, my grandmother’s 1975 community church cookbook. In just 164 pages, this collection of homestyle recipes encapsulates the unlikely intersections of 1800s frontier cuisine, post-war convenience foods, and the mid-century American fetishization of canned chow mein noodles. It is untested, unstandardized, and unmatched in its vintage glory in my opinion. Some of the recipes are amazingly good! And some are amazingly…not. So, without further a-dew, let’s take a look at this soft drink salad.

Gelatin is definitely having a 21st-century moment, with inclusion in kitsch art, keto recipes, and very fancy hors d'oeuvres, but I don’t think it’s really reaching the modern zenith it deserves, despite my best efforts. I want to see it center stage again, the guest of totally-not-sarcastic honor at every fashionable shin-dig. But first, I want to make fun of it, and that’s why I chose this recipe:

Mountain Dew Salad.

This is one weird recipe, even if you can get past the use of “salad” as referring to anything with assembled bits rather than actual dressed vegetables. First of all, 4 small boxes is going to make a lot, and it would be cheaper to buy 2 large boxes. Secondly, the liquid ratio is very unusual, more like the amount that you’d use to make Jello Jigglers, which are intended to be finger food. Lastly, it’s pretty short on details; we’re left to guess about whether we’re supposed to drain the pineapple, what sized pan to pour the gelatin into, how big is a No. 2 can, and…what the heck is Dream Whip?

I’m going to have to make some educated guesses here, but I’ll tell you what I’m not going to make: a whole batch of this recipe. I’m dividing it by four, so for the main layer, I’m starting with one small box of lemon Jell-O. A No. 2 pineapple can is about 20 ounces, so I’ll use 1/4 of that, and I’m using slightly shredded chunks instead of crushed, because (waste not want not) I need chunks for a different recipe. I’m not using the juice for reasons I’ll explain in a minute. I’ll also need 1 banana, 1/2 c mini marshmallows, and 3 oz. of Mountain Dew.

The cursed ingredients.

I think that the relatively low liquid amount is designed to help the “salad” gel despite the acid in the soda, but I decided early on to take my first risk — I don’t think 3 oz. of Mountain Dew is going to dew it for me, so I’m going to add 6 oz. to try to punch up the flavor. I added 6 oz of boiling water to dissolve the gelatin, stirred for about 2 weeks to make sure it was dissolved (rubber skin salad = bad), and then added the soda. I wish I could say I think this will cause a carbonated effect, but I’m pretty sure it won’t — the sugar in the gelatin provides plenty of nucleation sites for bubbles to form, and it foams like a rabid, um, jellyfish.

My next modification: the banana. Bananas turn brown in about 2 seconds of course, even if they’re encased in acidic gelatin. I tossed them with the pineapple, microwaved for one minute to at least partially denature the polyphenol oxidase, the enzyme that causes browning, and set them aside to cool.

As expected, the Jell-O took longer to reach the goo stage that you want before adding any tidbits lest they float towards escape, but it got there eventually. I squished in the (not browned!) bananas, pineapple, and mini mallows, and returned it to chill.

But wait, what kind of pan did I use? Well, I used a few different ones to see what worked best — a round terrine, some individual serving tower molds, and a sundae dish. I chilled it overnight.

Like a lot of old community recipes, this one hides extra ingredients in the instructions, so it pays to read carefully before shopping. No problem finding a package of lemon Jell-O pudding and pie filling, but Dream Whip, a packaged powder used to make whipped topping, isn’t widely available unless you order online for $$$. It’s based on milk, saturated oils, and corn syrup — so similar to Cool Whip that it’s fine to substitute 2 cups of that (or whipped cream if you fold very carefully) in most recipes, assuming the instructions call for it to be made as directed and not used in powdered form. This one does not say, and it’s hard to know for sure. It absolutely could mean that you are supposed to mix dry powder into prepared pudding, but that would thicken to near cement levels, and it says to fold the pudding into the Dream Whip. I think that means to make both packages as directed and then fold the pudding carefully into the topping, but maybe this was originally even weirder than I thought?

I went with 2 cups of whipped stuff added to the pudding, educated guess-style. If you’re quartering the recipe, that means you’ll use about 1 1/3 cups of that mixture to top your gelatin. It also means you’re going to have a lot of very strange lemon pudding left over. Do what I did and use it to shore up your weatherstripping.*

Serving suggestion, if you must.

This makes 4 servings of a pretty cloudy looking gelatin because of the bubbles from the soda and the tidbits, but it could be worse. You can make little individual towers out of it, and topped as shown in the first photo, they are the absolute height of fashion for circa 1910s America, but I wouldn’t try to make a big one even if you’re using the lesser amount of soda — it’s quite wiggly even after many hours. Mountain Dew has a pH of 3.22, nearing some vinegars, so it’s an active gel inhibitor. Of the dishes I tried, I think the sundae dish is best — it shows off the colors without expecting it to hold its own weight.

If you make the whole giant, 4-box recipe, put it in a 13x9 inch pan, and try cutting into squares and serving with a spatula, but I gotta be honest…it’s probably going to splatula.

There’s a much-appreciated radioactive quality to the color that I chalk up to the soft drink even though it doesn’t contain brominated vegetable oil anymore; it’s still got that unnatural glow that only Yellow #5 can impart. But, how does it taste?

I’m going to call this one Mountain Don’t Salad. The pudding isn’t bad, more like vanilla lightly flavored with lemon than I expected, but in combination with the marshmallow, it has the strangest effect — the absolutely real banana tastes unaccountably fake. And the Dew is totally AWOL even with the doubled amount, crushed under the double strength lemon gelatin flavoring.

This is the first time I’ve ever accused Mountain Dew of being too subtle, and I’ll bet it’s the last.

*Do not do this under any circumstances.

RD’s note: This is not a healthy dessert by any stretch of the imagination, but if you usually eat your vegetables and keep your sugar intake to a dull roar, it’s okay to treat yourself from time to time. Actually, it’s not just okay to treat yourself — it’s critical to find ways to enjoy flavors and textures that fulfill what we all need from our food: comfort, memory, indulgence. Restriction is unsustainable, it usually backfires, and it’s also a real drag. I don’t really suggest you waste a treat on this monstrosity, though. Still, if you insist, it’s at least 3 carb servings (over 45 g of carbohydrate), and maybe 3 g of protein if you round up generously — not a great choice even by dessert standards. On the plus side, there’s a smidge of vitamin C, and it only has 7 mg of caffeine! And if it reminds you of your grandma? That’s another kind of nourishment that can’t be replaced. Just remember to Dew responsibly.