This week I felt like mixing together some ketchup and some cherry gelatin. Just because.
This is Cherry-Catsup Salad!
AuthorRetroRuth
From Favorite Recipes From Home Economics Teachers, Salads - 1964
Tested Recipe!
[cooked-sharing]
Dissolve gelatin in boiling water, cool. Add remaining ingredients. Chill until firm.
Yield: 6
Ingredients
Directions
Dissolve gelatin in boiling water, cool. Add remaining ingredients. Chill until firm.
Yield: 6
Notes
This nut-job of a recipe comes from a great book, Favorite Recipes of Home Economics Teachers Salads, that comes from a fantastic series of books. The Favorite Recipes of Home Economics Teachers, which I believe was re-published 2007, is a huge, detailed book series that collected thousands of recipes from Home Economics teachers and packed them into a bunch of themed, spiral-bound books.
There are a lot of really good recipes, recipe-box recipes and back-of-the-box favorites in these books, but there are also some very unique recipes. And some crazy ones as well. This recipe would fall into the crazy category. But we’ve mixed ketchup and sweets before, and it actually turned out okay, so I was interested to see how this one would turn out.
Ketchup and cherry gelatin. For daaaaaaays.
So, the big red flag in this recipe isn’t, as you would suspect, the ketchup. It’s the black olives. If it had been maraschino cherries, I think we would have maybe had a fighting chance with this gelatin. But black olives in a vintage recipe always means something is trying to be savory (even when it’s not savory at all), so when you see them mixed with a sweet ingredient it is pretty much game over.
Do you see what I am saying?
Tom does.
“Wow. That face.”
“This is…really weird.”
“So, bad?”
“Unless you like a bunch of random crap thrown together, you are not going to like this at all.”
The Verdict: Weird
From The Tasting Notes –
This didn’t go together at all. At all! If you have ever had a bite of ketchup-covered hot dog in your mouth and washed it down with a gulp of cherry Kool-Aid, then you know what this gelatin tasted like. It tasted like a bad idea. Add a bite of salad to that mouthful, and you have the complete flavor profile: A bunch of random ingredients, thrown together and suspended in gelatin. I can guess that this was supposed to be a type of side to be served with meat, like a sauce or a chutney, but I can’t think of the type of meat that this would compliment. Except for hot dogs, apparently. In this gelatin’s defense, it had a good, crunchy texture. And it did remind us of summer through the whole hot-dog Kool-Aid thing. But other than that it was a bunch of different flavors all happening at once. And all those flavors told us ketchup and cherry gelatin do not go together well.
Um. No. LOL.
I hope you guys are enjoying your summer!!!
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You know that face Kermit the Frog makes when he’s really bewildered? I am making that face right now IRL. Dear god.
The salad looks awful, but the Disneyland plate is awesome.
Makes me wonder who this Home Ec teacher was trying to torture by posting this as her *favorite* recipe! 🙂
Wow. Yikes. Thank you for trying this so the rest of us don’t have to.
I can’t help thinking that the first picture looks like food in a dog bowl 😛
Oh uggg. So glad you were the one to try making this instead of me.
As I was reading the recipe, I’m thinking, “No. Ok, maybe. Maybe…maybe…maybe…_OLIVES?!_
(OH, THE HORROR.)
I thought this might have had a chance as a brightly sweet tomato aspic, perhaps with green olives and any of the other things that go into savory tomato aspics to help cut all the sugar in both the ketchup and the cherry gelatin. Or, it could have gone the way of a sweet side dish, like cranberry sauce, by omitting the olives entirely. But it sure doesn’t seem to know where it wants to live on the palette.
LOL! I had to laugh. We sold those books for a fundraiser when I was in junior high. Each of us was supposed to take a cake or cookies out of the dessert one..bake it up for a bake sale..then push the book in front of JCPenneys..in the early seventies. I did this rocky road cake that just–fail. It sank; it was rubbery. I tried to save it by burying it in icing. I can’t remember if it sold..but I do remember pitying its victim.
My sister still has those books–I might have one. I’ll have to look. LOL..I remember a lot of weird recipes in them..and thinking..and these gals do this for a LIVING////
For Christmas dinner my mother used to make a ring mold like this made of lime Jell-O with walnuts and martini olives (complete with pimientos), among other atrocities. The nightmares came flooding back . . .
Yikes! Nothing about this one seems remotely good. You all are braver than I am for trying some of these recipes!
Oh, god. Why, why, why do so many recipes from this time period insist on putting olives in everything, especially when they have no earthly reason for being there? Things seem to go so well, and then, blam, come in olives to ruin it.
(If you couldn’t tell, I hate olives.)
^re comment above: also celery. Celery seems to be everywhere.
Thus proving–yet again–the Jello (Registered Trademark) was never the problem. It was the crap crazy people threw in the poor Jello.
Agree that the olives were the killer here although they should probably take the celery along on their walk of shame. I say this as a lifelong member of the olive fan club, btw.
Since it wasn’t mentioned, I guess that the ketchup wasn’t very detectable in the finished product?
“tasted like a bad idea”
I love that phrase.