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Pineapple Cheese Salad
2 pkgs. lemon jello 2 C crushed pineapple 1 C American cheese 1/2 pt. whipping cream Prepare jello as directed on package and when it starts to set beat until very light and thick. Cream the cheese and add it to the jello with the pineapple and cream which has been beaten stiff. Set in cool place to harden.
Mary McCormick.
A mid-century congealed salad that depends entirely on timing: the gelatin has to be caught at exactly the right stage. Everything else is assembly.
- The hinge: when to beatChill the gelatin until it is the consistency of raw egg white — thickened but not yet firm, which may take an hour or more in the refrigerator; judge it by look and feel rather than by the clock. Beat too early and it will not aerate; too late and you get a lumpy, broken mixture that never smooths out.
- Package sizes have shrunkPackage sizes -- Two modern boxes of flavored gelatin give you 6 oz, and between them they call for 4 cups of liquid. Use about 3 cups instead, since the pineapple and cream add moisture and you want a salad firm enough to slice.
- Canned pineapple onlyFresh or frozen pineapple contains bromelain, an enzyme that digests gelatin and will leave you with soup. Canned pineapple has been heated enough to destroy it. Drain the 2 cups well — press it in a sieve — or the excess syrup will loosen the set.
- "American cheese"In a mid-century community cookbook this means either mild processed loaf cheese or plain domestic mild cheddar. One cup means one cup grated, about 4 oz. Processed cheese creams more smoothly; cheddar gives more flavor but wants to be grated very fine so it disperses.
- Creaming the cheeseBring it fully to room temperature first and work it with a fork or the paddle of a mixer until soft. Cold cheese added to cold gelatin gives you specks rather than a suspension. A tablespoon or two of mayonnaise or cream cheese helps it slacken.
- Half a pint of creamThat is 1 cup, whipped to soft-to-medium peaks. Fold it in last, in two additions, so the aeration survives.
- Setting and yield"A cool place" means the refrigerator — four hours minimum, better overnight. The beaten mixture is bulky, so use a mold or pan with room to spare; it serves 8 to 10 as a side.
- How it was servedCut in squares on a lettuce leaf, or unmolded from a ring with the center filled with more whipped cream or fruit. It belongs beside ham or cold chicken, not after dinner, despite the sugar.
Congealed salads like this one sit in the odd territory between side dish and dessert, which is why cookbook committees filed them wherever there was room — here, improbably, under Pickles and Relishes. They belong to the era when powdered flavored gelatin, canned crushed pineapple and processed cheese were all cheap, shelf-stable and reliable, and when a molded salad that could be made the day before was exactly what a church supper or a bridge luncheon needed. The whipped-gelatin technique — beating the base at the soft-set stage to double its volume and turn it opaque — is generally traced to gelatin manufacturers' recipe pamphlets of the mid-twentieth century, and it is what separates this from a simple fruit mold: the result is a pale, mousse-like block rather than a translucent jelly. Recipes signed with a contributor's name, as this one is, are the backbone of American community cookbooks, which were often said to be sold to raise money for a congregation's building fund or missionary work.