So, if you have been following our Facebook page, you may have seen a preview of this lovely thing this week. Apparently, since Tom had nothing better to do, he convinced me to try the most disgusting mid-century gelatin recipe we have ever found.
This is California Prune Cream Salad.
Is it just me, or does this look like something from the Jim Henson Creature Shop? I feel like at any minute it’s going to blink it’s prune eyes and start talking.
It’s…looking at you.
AuthorRetroRuth
From Prunes Add Variety, 1934
Tested Recipe!
[cooked-sharing]
Cut prunes into pieces. Soften gelatin in cold water and dissolve over hot water. Add chili sauce to cheese, then mayonnaise, cream beaten until still and dissolved gelatin. Fold in prunes and pickles and mix well. Pour into shallow pan and chill. Cut in squares and serve on lettuce.
Yield: 10 to 12 servings
Ingredients
Directions
Cut prunes into pieces. Soften gelatin in cold water and dissolve over hot water. Add chili sauce to cheese, then mayonnaise, cream beaten until still and dissolved gelatin. Fold in prunes and pickles and mix well. Pour into shallow pan and chill. Cut in squares and serve on lettuce.
Yield: 10 to 12 servings
Notes
Hoooooooookay.
In my defense, I wanted to make the prune chocolate cake on the next page. But Tom latched on to this one and would Not. Let. Go.
And now that you have seen cottage cheese, prunes and chili sauce together in a bowl, let’s have a little chat about food trends gone amok.
Prunes Add Variety, 1934.
In every interview I’ve every given, one of the first questions anyone ever asks is, “Why was gelatin so popular? What was the fascination?”
As I make more and more mid-century food, I’ve realized something. It wasn’t just gelatin that was popular. Salads and the idea of the salad course was a trend. All salads – green, fruit, gelatin – they were all popular. I think we, right now, tend to focus more on the gelatin aspect of everything because they are, to us, the most bizarre. The vintage gelatin pictures most offend our modern palates. And yes, gelatin salads probably edged out others in magazines and books just because they were showier and “glamorous”, but other salads and salad trends were just as popular on everyday tables.
Mayonnaise, for instance. Mayonnaise in everything and its use as an all-consuming condiment and vegetable dip. And the mixing of tomato or ketchup into salad dressings. And the serving of prunes or other fruit with cottage cheese.
What I am trying to say is – this salad abuses more than one popular salad trend. On paper, this would seem like the trendiest salad you could make in the 1930’s. The only thing that could make this more on trend in the 1930’s would be if it was frozen.
In reality, all it ends up being is a giant, smelly mess.
Psych-ing himself up. Did I mention how bad this thing smelled???? It smelled rotten before I even finished mixing it.
“How is it?”
“Oh it’s….it’s great.”
”What?!?”
“Yeah, great….best thing I’ve ever had. You should try some.”
“You’re lying aren’t you?”
“A little. This is the worst thing ever.”
“That’s what I thought. You can stop making that face now.”
“I can’t, I’m trying not to cry.”
The Verdict: So Bad, It Makes Grown Men Cry
From The Tasting Notes –
This may quite possibly take the #1 spot as the worst thing we’ve ever made here on MCM. This was bad. And not, “Ha ha…this is so funky” bad, this was legitimately horrible. Absolutely horrible. The smell alone was enough to peel paint, and the salad itself was horrific. It never really set up in any way into something that you could slice. The best way to describe the texture would be “glorpy”. It was a gooey, sticky mess. The only texture change in the whole thing was the sweet pickles. And they weren’t a good addition. The flavor had absolutely nothing redeeming in it. There was no “Well, maybe if we left out this or that.” No. This was all around bad. The sweet pickles were overpowering, and mixed horribly with the prunes and gave off a flavor that can only be described as bile. The mayo, cottage cheese and chili sauce didn’t do much but gum everything up, so much so that when you took a bite you weren’t really tasting them so much as trying to figure out how a bite of silly putty got in your mouth. Horrible. Absolutely, totally horrible.
And it was all Tom’s idea.
worse than Liver Pate en Masque?
Jelly (as Jello was traditionally called and is still called in the UK) is a centuries old dish, and it was one enjoyed only by the wealthiest people in society. Jellies were both sweet and savory. They were very expensive and very difficult and very time-consuming, really requiring the skills and equipment of a professional chef. Jelly is basically a meat by-product food, and often included other expensive ingredients (e.g. sugar for the sweet jellies). To make the elaborate jellies of earlier centuries required great skill, special molds, and most of all, a way to chill the jelly to make it set. This was no simple task.
When refrigeration became common in American homes starting in the 1920s and jellies became commercially available in an easy, ready-to-make mix, average people suddenly had access to what was once a rare and expensive food. They obviously made the most of these new commercial developments with many jelly recipes, both sweet and savory, enjoying what was once a treat of the upper classes only. All these strange (to us) jelly dishes of the mid-century were really not so strange in the larger context of history. Not that that makes some of them any more palatable.
All true! But gelatins weren’t the only thing that rose in popularity due to refrigeration. All salad making was given a huge boost. Even for green salads, many recipes read “chill bowls to ice cold” or “best served in chilled bowls”, something home cooks hadn’t been able to do year round.
It was an exciting time to be a home cook!
I would say it was worse. I think Tom said it was a draw, that they were both horrible.
It always seems so funny to my modern mind that “chilled” became a great selling point. I enjoy looking at old menus, and they will often use “chilled” as a descriptor, as in “chilled tomato juice,” whereas now I think we would just assume that it was going to be served cold rather than at room temperature. It’s good to be reminded how something we take for granted every day, such as home refrigeration, was really a revolutionary development. I still think I’ll pass on the prune cream salad, chilled or not.
This sounded oddly interesting and might actually work- glad Tom took it for the team.
I just ran across a recipe in the family recipe box for a bizzaro prune upside down cake that is aching to be made. After this is couldn’t be this bad so its time to give it a go.
I’m a little disappointed. I was hoping to see a photo of Tom spitting it out on the lawn. If he didn’t do it with this recipe, there’s no hope for the future.
Rats, I should have had him take a picture of me. I am pretty sure I spat my bite out. Yuck.
You know, now that you mention it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Tom spit food out once it is in his mouth. Ever. Wow, kind of blowing my mind here.
Do it, do it, do it!
And send pictures! 🙂
Oh, old menus are the best. I adore them. They are great serving ideas and tips. I also use them for helping to recreate what sides commonly went with certain main dishes.
And yes, no one needs try prune cream salad. No one.
Wow . . . that’s really disgusting. What amazes me is that someone not only thought up that hideous mixture, but felt confident enough that it was actually GOOD that they wrote it down.
Reminds me of an old SNL skit in which people aren’t sure if milk has gone bad or not, so they take turns drinking it. “Uuuugh, yes . . . that is A-mmonia! Here, taste it!” 🙂
The only thing missing was hard boiled eggs! Everything else that tastes bad together was in there….
He ASKED for it?!? Tom. I can’t believe I’ve been feeling sorry for you all this time.
One of my favorite movies is Dinner At Eight from the early 30’s, and at the dinner, ‘Cook’ is making an aspic for the hoity toity visiting guests. And on Upstairs, Downstairs, Mrs. Bridges prepared aspics for the family and their visitors, and it was a long and tricky process…and prunes were used more frequently in the past, I think, I’ve seen other vintage recipes and the reports on some of them were much more favorable! Prune Whip, for one. Thank you for this one, I laughed!
This is so great – we just posted a list of retro foods that we don’t miss, and there is a LOT of gelatin and aspic going on!
OK, do. not. make. things. with. prunes.
I applaud you both.
Prunes and pickles and chili sauce. No. Just no.
Just looking at the list of ingredients I knew this wasn’t going to go well.
I recall some Moroccan beef dish I tried that had ras al hanout in it and also prunes. It was pretty good but the prunes, though they had apparently disintegrated in cooking, were I think the reason I didn’t save leftovers.
Or maybe it’s that ras al hanout sounds like a Batman villain, but I blame the prunes.
My mother made a dessert she called prune whip. It was like a mousse, light and sort of fluffy and was served with a custard sauce. I remember liking it, but then you could put custard sauce on an old shoe and I would like it.
True, cottage cheese and mayonnaise were as trendy as gelatin back in the day.
My grandmother still likes to mix ketchup and mayonnaise together as dressing for a lettuce salad.
I am sorry, but that looks like a gift my cat would leave me to find when I step on it in the middle of the night. And I LIKE prunes. Ick.
I just bought an old church cookbook that proclaimed, “Every recipe thoroughly tested by our cooks!” on the front. I thought it was funny because I had always assumed that any recipe in a cookbook was tested before publication. Now I know better because clearly no one tasted this… concoction… before sending it out for printing.
The prune chocolate cake doesn’t sound so bad now, I bet!
When you think about it, we do live in amazing times. Agriculture has been built up so we can get fresh vegetables of so many varieties, all the time. You can go to the grocery store and be disappointed when some small, random item is unavailable, but think of everything that is there! I’m a child of the 70s and remember when you couldn’t get fresh pineapple in the stores all the time, and the only lettuce was iceberg, and tomatoes were pink in the winter. (I live in a northern state and we have tasty hydroponic tomatoes at the stores now, grown within 100 miles of my home, year round – it’s kind of a miracle. I mean, they aren’t as good as the ones from the garden, but they are a lot better than the pink ones.) We were lucky to find one or two shapes of pasta, and Old El Paso taco kits, and La Choy chinese food kits. They didn’t have the selection of salsa and Oriental sauces and Italian delicacies they have now. There were only two or three flavors of chips, for heaven’s sake. And ice cream came in cube shaped boxes… anyway… yeah, I’m old.
I think that was the mid century obsession with jello and cold stuff – refrigeration was new, they were trying to sell all sorts of fun new products and get people to use their new appliances for more than just waiting for the milkman. “You can keep the rest of the jar of mayo, the rest of your cream, the remaining pickles, and the rest of the cottage cheese in your fridge next to this vomit-flavored salad!” Though containers were a lot smaller than, maybe this used the whole thing. Plus, they had access to lots of different types of food all year round, for the first time.
Sorry for the diatribe. This got me thinking!
this looks like something my dog left on the carpet!
Oh, yes! I do vaguely remember the days of shopping at the A&P or the Big M. Now the grocery stores are enormous food emporiums with a bewildering number of choices in almost anything. I remember in the 60’s buying a box of potato chips – the size of a large-ish shoebox, and that was a treat, the only kind of potato chip on the shelf, and meant to last us all week. (No wonder people were a lot slimmer back then, we had soda at parties only, no fast-food places on every block, and a limited selection of groceries.)
I don’t mind prunes, but anything that tastes like bile… You two are brave souls, I commend you!
I think I read all the comments and I didnt see a-one talking about the purported laxative “benefit” of prunes! I’m too young to have experienced this directly, but as a kid I read a lot, often books that were written MUCH earlier than I realized at the time (this was the eighties, and Beverly Cleary’s books, for example, were written in the fifties! Even Judy blume’s books were written early enough that “Are you there God it’s me Margaret” terrified me into thinking that when I got my period I’d need to wear some kind of belt).
ANYWAY, tangent aside, I seem to recall prunes and prune juice often referred to as solutions to constipation (obliquely) and as something old people were evidently required to drink. In fact, I probably *did* witness prune juice in some elderly fridge, but that might have been in the seventies.
Perhaps in a day when there was no understanding of fiber’s role in the diet and the importance of hydration, and no reliable nostrums, constipation was both ubiquitous and (ha!) insoluble, leaving prunes as the only viable option. However, since they were associated with the unlovely bowels, prunes would never actually be delicious, they may have intrinsically been sort of punishing, so eating something as vomitus as this recipe was merely to be expected. After all, who said medicine should taste good?
Oh man, I literally cannot look at the picture of it all mixed together without gagging. Nothing you’ve made has ever done that before. This is now my #1 personal worst thing ever made, lol.
I took one look at that picture and started screaming internally.
Funny that you mentioned the belt in “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” I am also a child of the ’80s and I had the exact same fear about getting my period and wearing this awful belt. Well somehow or another I came across a copy of that book recently, and I decided to read it. THERE WAS NO BELT. The book had been updated. This saddened me for some reason.
This was hilarious. I showed my hubby to remind him how *LUCKY* he is that my hobby is baking, not making mid-century recipes like this one. We laughed & laughed.
Do ya think it might be edible without the chili sauce and pickle? I actually like prunes. I hate prune juice. I don’t know why.,.
Oh dear, I am dying laughing! Literally, tears are rolling down my cheeks. My husband thinks I have gone mad. Any cook with all senses intact and a little experience could predict that this would be dreadful. It makes me wonder if a few cookbook authors have issues with passive-aggressive behavior…