Squares of gelatin salad for the win

In Saving Southern Recipes, Southern Kitchen’s Kate Williams explores the deep heritage of Southern cooking through the lens of passeddown, old family recipes.

Let’s face it: Congealed salads are not sexy. Molded, colorful, and full of canned ingredients, these not-reallysalads are decidedly retro, and not in a sleek mid-century modern kind of way. Even the word “congealed” is kind of ugly, and it’s certainly not an adjective I think of when I’m thinking of, well, food.

But back in the 1950s, when Jell-O was peaking in popularity, these towering dishes layered with all manner of fruits, vegetables and even meats were a shining beacon of what American engineering could do.

Of course, gelatin-based dishes were nothing new. One of the most popular cookbooks in the colonies and later, early America, was Hannah Glasse’s “The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy,” which featured multiple recipes for “jelly” made from stewed calves’ feet and the first known mention of elaborate jellied trifles. Jellies continued to increase in popularity throughout the Victorian era, especially after the invention of powdered gelatin in 1845 and flavored Jell-O in 1897.

However, it wasn’t until the invention of affordable home refrigerators that JellO salads really began to take off. Jell-O salads became so popular in post-War America that the company began to manufacture savory flavors of the powder, such as celery, Italian, and mixed vegetable, to suit the vast number of recipes appearing in books like “Charleston Receipts.” But despite the relative ease of Jell-O, congealed salads began to wane in popularity by the late 1960s, as more and more women joined and stayed in the workforce.

During my childhood, my immediate family didn’t much care for gelatin salads, so I only saw these dishes at larger reunions. The most common was a dish we called “green squares,” a sliceable variation of lime-flavored “emerald salad.” Filled with pineapple, cottage cheese and mayonnaise, the salad is one of those curious amalgamations of pantry ingredients that sounds (to me) quite absurd, but manages to still taste good. With a few tweaks, like adding fresh citrus zest, I managed to make it taste great.

Do you have a beloved family recipe to share? Send a picture of the recipe card or a typed-out version of the recipe to kate@ southernkitchen.com.