Strawberry pretzel salad is a salty-sweet retro dessert
I didn’t grow up eating strawberry pretzel salad. I first encountered it at a friend-of-a-friend’s house some years ago while home in Chicago.
Initially, I was perplexed: This “salad” consisted of a pretzel crust, cream cheese filling, strawberries and Jell-O. Then I tasted it — and I was hooked after one bite. It’s salty, creamy and fruity, all at once. The dish has remained implanted in my memory ever since, and now I’m elated to share it with you.
The aspect that throws people off is the incongruity between the dish and what many consider a salad. But food historians and people above a certain age can recall the prominence that congealed salads had in America, particularly in the mid 20th century — and some of them, such as this one, are still enjoyed today.
According to Farmers’ Almanac, the strawberry pretzel salad was introduced to the world in
“The Joys of Jell-O,” first published by General Foods in 1963. While congealed salads have largely fallen out of the limelight since then, strawberry pretzel salad remains an iconic dish, particularly in the South and Midwest where, because of the low-effort it requires and the large number of servings recipes typically produce, it is popular at potlucks, holidays and other large gatherings.
I consider it a dessert, but others disagree: “It’s a sweet, but it’s not a dessert,” Andrew Spena wrote in Epicurious. “As my Memaw might explain, it’s just ‘a little bit of sugar on your plate at dinner.’ It sits right there on your Thanksgiving plate next to your mains, your collards, your mac & cheese, your mashed potatoes.”
Regardless of the categorization, this light, saltysweet confection is a delight.
Strawberry pretzel salad is essentially a pretzel crust with a no-bake cheesecake filling topped with strawberries and fruit-flavored gelatin. More traditional recipes call for store-bought whipped topping to be mixed with the cream cheese for the filling, but whipping heavy cream in the same food processor used to crush the pretzels requires minimal additional effort. Vanilla extract is traditional for flavoring the filling, but my recipe developer brain couldn’t help but think about all of the other flavoring possibilities, a few of which I’ve listed below.
Fresh strawberries are great in this recipe — making it particularly suited for spring and summer — but you can use frozen, thawed and drained fruit, if necessary, or even try different fruit and gelatin combinations to make this your own.