Talk About Good: The Coca-Cola Salad from my grandmother's 1975 church cookbook

These ingredients aren't usually associated with salad. What lies beneath?

Language is a funny thing. Once you learn a noun, a picture of it pops into your mind when you hear or read it. So tell me, what do you see in your mind’s eye when you hear the word “salad”? For most of us, the first picture is something with cold and raw leafy greens, perhaps some cherry tomatoes, croutons, onions, sunflower seeds. The etymology of the word is believed to be a shortened version of the Latin herba salata, meaning salted herbs, so that picture you have is the historically correct one. If you think a bit more, though, you’ll probably come up with lettuce-free versions like fruit or potato or pasta salad. Perhaps confusion sets in, but never fear — that’s just the modern dictionary meaning starting to pop through: “salad” merely means bite-sized pieces of plant matter mixed together.

Oh, except for ham salad. And tuna salad. But it’s a minor alteration, isn’t it? We’re just including meats now, no biggie. Meanings change a bit over time, and your feet are still firmly on dependable social construct ground. The word has kept the heart of its matter: little bits of food, tossed together, and unified with some kind of lovely dressing, like vinaigrette or mayonnaise. This use of the word is actually quite old, 17th century at least, and meat salads were common in the United States even before they were states, or united.

It’s not until the 20th century that the wheels really came off.

Enter the congealed salad. It started off innocently enough, with little morsels of food not dressed with a liquid but encased in a gel, a literal glitch in a matrix, but you can still understand the origin. Perfection Salad is one such example, with shredded vegetables and a vinegar-kissed gelatin. Ugh.

Through the years, every aspect of the original meaning has been burnt at at the stake, or rather, mummified in jelly. The vegetables are often not just cooked, but boiled into submission — this Layer-Pak Salad used a can of squishy vegetables made expressly for that purpose. Meat and fruit co-mingle wantonly in Ring-Around-the-Tuna. Barbecue Salad has left aside even the bits — it’s smooth, expressionless, a condiment that has attained sentience and appears to be dispassionately consolidating its power in preparation for world domination. It’s even cloning itself.

The Unholy Trinity: Layer-Pak, Ring Around the Tuna, and Barbecue Salads

All this to say, the “Soups, Salads, Vegetables” chapter of my grandmother’s church cookbook is my absolute favorite. There are delightful recipes for baked corn casseroles, eggplant fritters, cabbage slaws, and if you’re really hungry, there are instructions for two gallons of beef, chicken and vegetable Hopkins County Stew. Betwixt and between are the salad recipes: Spring Salad! Easy Quick Salad! Five Cup Salad! Although they do have marshmallows, none of those salad recipes have anything resembling salad in them. The Corned Beef Salad has corned beef in it, though!

Does that mean the Christmas Salad contains Christmas?

No.

I’ve otherwise seen similar recipes called Coke Salad, and just like the Mountain Dew Salad I made recently, it really does have Coke in it, as well as black cherries, cherry jello, pineapple (always with the pineapple), nuts, and cream cheese. Cream cheese is always welcome in a gelatin salad, I feel, because it really helps cut the, you know, gelatin. But dairy with Coke? I’m dubious.

Plus, no marshmallows? Is this even salad?!?

I had to do some detective work about how many ounces were in a “small bottle” of Coke in 1975, or in a jar of black cherries, which no longer exist as far as I can tell. From trolling vintage stores, I know that the small Coke was 8 oz., and Liberty cherries at least came in a 6 oz. jar. You can still find the special bicentennial jar for the latter on eBay, in its characteristic Liberty Bell shape. I’m going to use 4 oz. of thawed frozen cherries with about 2 oz. of juice, plus a little extra sugar to account for the missing corn syrup. This should give us about a half cup of juice along with the pineapple juice from the can, making for 1 1/2 cups of liquid in the recipe. It’s good to do some double-checking with community-written, vintage recipe, and luckily this sounds about right — a 3 oz. box of Jell-O calls for 2 cups of water, but when using an acidic ingredient like soda, liquid is adjusted down to compensate for the interference with gelling.

I confess utter confusion about how you are supposed to “grate” cream cheese, which, like “meat salad” is an American…well, Americanization…of a leaner European tradition. This product adds richness to the original French Neufchatel that would make a Puritan blush, but not enough that it’s solidly grate-able. You could freeze it, but since it’s supposed to melt, that would seem unlikely. Did it used to be more firm? Not that I can find through research, although I did learn that Philadelphia Cream Cheese originated in New York — quel scandale. I elected to employ the same method I use to substitute Neufchatel for heavy cream in soups and sauces, and warmed it slightly in the microwave so that I could gradually add liquid a spoonful at a time, stir until smooth, and then incorporate. It’s almost like tempering eggs. The result is a bloody mess. Adding the brown Coke just makes it worse.

I chilled until jelly-like so that the fruit wouldn’t all rise from the dead…I mean, to the top, but I put all the chopped nuts in the last layer, separately. I hate to be indelicate, but doing this gives your gelatin that little bit of crunch without making it look so much like, well…vomit.

Plating this one was dicey. The Coke’s phosphoric acid loosens the gelatin’s grip on itself, and reality, but that doesn’t keep it from sticking to the mold. And once it was out (in one piece!), there was the question of garnish, whose highest purpose is to indicate to the eater what’s inside. That’s especially helpful for something like this, opaque, forbidding, and entirely closed-mouthed about what lies beneath. Frozen black cherries do not make an attractive garnish — they look like olives. I don’t have any more pineapple. I considered crushed nuts, but it strikes me as entirely too sophisticated. The only thing left is Coke, and that’s when inspiration struck. It’s not widely recognized, but Coke’s signature flavor is partially from citrus oils, and this is also my opportunity to include marshmallows so that this salad can grace the table with its head held high!

Sort of.

Tower molds never stand as tall without their mold acting as a corset. Just accept it. If you look closely at the photo above, you’ll see something I’m really smug about: I thought to frame this one with the composter in the background. It’s foreshadowing.

I like texture in my Jell-O, but these huge pieces of fruit doom any chance you had of slicing cleanly. It’s going to tear and lump. As for the flavor, the real cherries are nice, but they highlight the fake cherry. You can barely taste the Coke, and that’s a real disappointment since Cherry Coke is the only acceptable use of fake cherry. The pineapple is a third wheel as usual. It makes absolutely no sense in this combo. The cream cheese is a nice flavor, but the opacity it necessarily implies is truly unfortunate. Finally, there’s a weird powdery mouthfeel that I’m at a loss to explain, but I also noticed it with the Mountain Dew Salad. I had wondered whether it was a consequence of the fire retardant (just kidding, there’s no fire retardant in Mountain Dew…anymore! Still just kidding…BVO wasn’t a flame retardant. It’s just chemically related, no biggie.), but since it’s happened again, I suspect a role for another common soda ingredient, or perhaps there are microbubbles. No more soda salads for me

Ever.

If you make this one, cut the fruit into smaller pieces, but unless you’re okay with a spoonable, unmolded salad, don’t add more Coke to try to boost the flavor — the extra acid would probably doom your mold. I would also double the cherries and omit the pineapple. Also, you could omit the cream cheese and hopefully get a nicer color. And, although I love cherry almond as a flavor pairing, and I typically find nuts a welcome de-gelling texture, in this case, they just compete with the cola and leave things muddled. Maybe omit those as well.

Maybe also omit the Jell-O?

Cherries. Just have the cherries.