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You can have my broccoli, bacon, and raisin salad and cookie salad when you pry them from my cold hardened arteries.
Why do all of these mid-west “salad” recipes have a 4-5 ingredients that seem ok, and then one god damn ingredient that is absolutely BONKERS. Like, why on earth does the cookie salad have mandarin oranges in it!? Whhhhhhyyyyyyyyyyy
Sometimes people put pineapple in it too but that doesn’t work as well. It doesn’t sound like it should work but it does. ¯\(ツ)/¯
Sigh… fair enough. Not going to yuck anyone’s yums, but I feel like I need to know the lore behind all of the various salads now. Is there a VaatiVidya for mid-western artery-destroying family-gathering side-dishes that I can binge watch on YouTube?
oh there's lots of videos about the rise of jello in American cuisine. i haven't seen any recently, and don't feel like going through the effort of vetting a good one right now, but yeah, just look up something along those lines. it was considered a modern miracle of food science and quite trendy for a bit there. it was also heavily featured in one or more prominent government cookbooks in like the 50s being used in this kind of way. i don't remember many of the details, but i think it was basically from a time when people were excited by new chemicals in their food and trusted scientists in s lab more than farmers in the field to make safe consistently available food. this was a similar time to wonder bread coming to popularity because flour contamination was becoming quiet prominent. we were entering a time when our population has reached modern scales, but our sanitation practices and knowledge hadn't caught up.
I think in some cases there was a random can of fruit that hadn’t been used in ages and someone was like “what do we do with this?” And bags of abandoned mini marshmallows.
There's actually two answers to that.
The first answer, and thus one that's behind most of it, is that a lot of these originated on the back of canned goods, or other pre-packaged foods. That was sometimes more about a brand making recipes up as part of the sales push. You'd see the shit in magazines all the time when I was growing up.
The other is what applies to the non commercial recipes, or at least is what I've been told over in reddit by food historians. And that's the fact that once the idea of the weird recipes got started, people adapted them, or tried to make up their own based on what they already had. So you'd run into weird shit where someone made what seemed good to them, but it was lacking something, so they added what would seem crazy if you hadn't already had some of the strange salads already.
It works sometimes. Like the addition of pineapple to jambalaya. Or putting pickles on a peanut butter sandwich. That kind of thing where you add an ingredient that really stands out, but manages to balance things despite not necessarily going with the rest in a complementary way.
Anyway, it's pretty amazing what kind of oddball combinations end up tasting much better than they should
I have 2 cookbooks that are literally just, “this recipe was from the back of the box/bag for xyz product that you don’t have anymore”.