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Vegetable Salad (Pkg lemon jello C boiling)
1 pkg. lemon jello 2 C boiling water Juice of one lemon 1 t salt Mrs. C. L. Thomson. 1 C cabbage cut fine 2 C celery cut fine 1/4 can sweet peppers cut up 1/2 C cucumber Let jello cool; then add ingredients and turn in mold. Serve on lettuce with mayonnaise dressing.
A congealed vegetable salad of the sort that filled midcentury church cookbooks. The instructions are terse, and two points of the original need translating before you start.
- The hinge: chill to egg-white stage"Let jello cool" means cool until it has the body of raw egg white, not merely until it stops steaming. Fold the vegetables in too early and they float to the top; too late and the gelatin sets in lumps around them.
- Package sizeA modern small box of lemon gelatin dessert is 3 oz (85 g) and is set with 2 cups of total liquid. This recipe uses the full 2 cups of boiling water plus the juice of a lemon, slightly more liquid than standard, so the set will be a little softer than a plain dessert mold.
- "1/4 can sweet peppers"Most likely canned pimientos or similar canned sweet peppers, which were commonly sold in small cans of around 4 oz; a quarter of one would be roughly a tablespoon or two, chopped and drained. A quarter of a fresh bell pepper gives a similar volume but a rawer, greener flavor.
- Salt in a sweet gelatinA full teaspoon reads oddly but is deliberate: it pulls the dessert gelatin toward savory. Stir it into the boiling water so it dissolves, and taste before adding the last of it if you are using salted mayonnaise alongside.
- Cucumber and cabbage waterBoth shed liquid. Salt the diced cucumber lightly, let it drain 15 minutes, and pat it dry before folding it in, or the mold will weep at the edges. Do not count that salt as part of the teaspoon.
- Setting and unmoldingFour to six hours in the refrigerator for a ring or loaf mold; overnight is safer. Dip the mold in warm water for a few seconds and invert onto a chilled plate — a warmed mold on a warm plate slumps.
- YieldThe vegetables alone come to nearly four cups, plus two cups of liquid, so expect somewhere around five to six cups of finished salad.
Molded vegetable salads descend from the plain gelatin "perfection salad" style that spread through American cooking in the first decades of the twentieth century, once powdered gelatin was cheap and reliable enough for ordinary households; the flavored dessert gelatins that arrived alongside it were quickly pressed into savory service, as here, where a lemon dessert package plus a teaspoon of salt does the work of unflavored gelatin and broth. Recipes like this one were valued for being made a day ahead, carried in the mold, and turned out at a church supper without wilting, which is often said to be much of why they were such a fixture of community collections.