Vintage Recipe Roulette: Purple *CENSORED* Holiday Salad
Christmas cheer in a non-traditional color, as well as an update on the 5th Annual Aspic Invitational
In case this is your first time visiting the Department of Antediluvian Disquietude and you missed the first installment, this is the latest in a series of Vintage Recipe Roulette reviews using 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. Today, we’re seeking inspiration from a color not for the faint of heart.
There’s an update on the Aspic Invitational spread at the end, but I can’t help thinking of my grandmother around the holidays, so this week, I’m returning to her beloved church cookbook. Purple Lady Salad is a blend of Jell-O, canned blueberries, crushed pineapple, nuts, and whipped topping.
There’s precious little in the way of instructions — is it meant to be scooped or molded? What sized cans of fruit? Do they even still can blueberries? (Yes.) It doesn’t intuitively scream Christmas, I know, but Emily Nunn of the excellent Department of Salad (you should definitely subscribe to that Substack if you think salad is boring or devoid of deliciousness, or also if you already love salad, of course) has a cookbook with a very similar recipe that h
er family always made for the holiday meal, and they called it, affectionately one supposes, Purple Shit. It’s one of those recipes that grabs you by the nostalgia and won’t let go. I’m betting that a recipe with these base ingredients was found on a box or advertisement in the 40s or 50s, so it’s shown up in both of our family recipe collections. Nunn included it in a sort of cookbook of hers — I say sort of because it’s much more than that — called The Comfort Food Diaries: My Quest for the Perfect Dish to Mend a Broken Heart.
The ingredients are almost the same, but instead of mixing everything together, her family put a layer of sour cream, cream cheese, and sugar in the middle between two deeply purple slabs.
I’m going to do a mashup of the two, but after a recent foray into the world of unflavored gelatin, and a serendipitous sample of Ocean Spray’s seasonal Mulled Blackberry Pear juice, I’m also going to go my own way a bit for a more natural, less sweet result. Here are the main ingredients:
I’m leaving out the mashed bananas, because ugh, nobody needs slowly rotting fruit in their holiday homecoming salad. I’m taking the nuts and berries with juice from the Lady, and the layer of cream from the Shit, and as for the Purple, well…The Ocean Spray Mulled Blackberry arrived around Thanksgiving, and honestly, I just haven’t known what to think about it. It’s not what I imagined it would be; the spice is very, very faint, and it doesn’t have the tannic twinge of deep and dark blackberry. I don’t hate it, and it’s better hot than cold, but essentially, it both smells and tastes like gummy bears, and I’m just not that into it.
However, staring down the barrel of this recipe, wherein I am instructed to choose grape or berry Jell-O, I decided instead to lean into the blackberry by gelling the juice with Knox. I just hate bird repellent I mean, fake grape so much.
One other little tweak I had to make — I chopped up chunk pineapple into sort of crushed, because EVERYBODY bought crushed pineapple this week. Are ALLLL y’all making Purple Shit?
I’m completely thrilled with how it turned out. There’s no artificial flavor or color, and the beautiful colors in the gel seeped into the cream layer. Yes, it’s still terrifying in the way Jell-O salads always are, but if they’re nostalgic for you, it’s in the best way.
It’s less sweet, more sophisticated than the usual lime and cottage cheese slab, and very easy to make. Since you can’t expect it to come out in clean slices, you don’t have to worry about whether the layers adhere. This gives you a lot of leeway in what you choose to use as your base. You could use any cooked fruit — jam or pie filling included — and the layer in the middle could be a meringue or stabilized whipped cream, or cottage cheese, or Greek yogurt.
A few ideas:
Cran-Apple and orange marmalade,
apple cider and pie filling,
strawberry jam and rose lemonade
…so there’s a template recipe at the end. But, the blackberries with mulled juice was amazing, a great place to start.
Also, speaking of using unflavored gelatin to fulfill your evil aspic desires, here are some photos from Susie Hamilton’s 5th Annual Aspic Invitational. (You can read my write-up about it in Texas Monthly here.) It was amazing. I’m thrilled to report that I did not double down on last year’s win, because that reflects the level of beauty and creativity that the entrants worked to achieve this year. The ramen one won a prize for appearance, and I think the flavor winner was the Whataburger spicy ketchup one. One weird parade, in the best way. I can hardly imagine what next year will bring.
Such a stellar table! I can’t say enough.
And finally, here’s that promised template should you choose to make your own quest. You might find you have the ingredients right in your pantry, at this very moment.
Layered $%^$# Salad Template Recipe:
1 c any juice (not raw, or the enzymes may interfere with gelling)
about 10 oz any cooked fruit with its juices, or thick jam, or fruit pie filling (cut into smaller pieces if needed)
1 8 oz can crushed pineapple, drained a bit
1/2 c chopped nuts (optional)
1 envelope plus 1/2 tsp of unflavored gelatin
4 oz cream cheese
1/2 c sour cream, or Greek yogurt, or blended cottage cheese
Put the gelatin in 1/4 c of the juice (cold) to bloom for 1 minute, stir into the other 3/4 c (hot) until fully dissolved. Add fruits and nuts, and taste to make sure the flavors are right. You can add a little sugar while it’s still warm if you need to. Let stand or chill just until starting to thicken to syrupy consistency. (TIP: put on teaspoon into a metal cup in an ice bath to make sure it will set. If it remains liquid, dissolve more gelatin into hot juice and add. If it’s rubbery, add more juice with no gelatin.) Pour half of it into a very lightly oiled 9x9 square pan, and chill until partially set.
Carefully spread the cream cheese mixture on top, and then pour over the other half of the gelatin mixture. Chill until fully set. Cut into squares to serve. If desired, place on a bed of crushed cookie crumbs, but some versions of this recipe will not hold in a cut square. It’s perfectly fine to serve it with a big spoon in a heap!
RD notes: I received the Ocean Spray Mulled Blackberry as a sample for review. No deals with the other brands shown or mentioned.
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