I grew up in an era when gelatin salads were considered, nutritionally speaking, the moral equivalent of vegetable salads, served with pride in place of fresh greens — though my grandmother would often up the nutritional ante by placing a rectangle of Jell-O on a single leaf of ruffled lettuce. At church picnics, big bowls of foamy ambrosia with fruit, gelatin, Cool Whip, cottage cheese and marshmallows were never on the dessert table; they were placed with the three-bean salad or pasta salad because they all tasted great with fried chicken.
We now live in a healthier epoch of Extreme Sugar Awareness and we know that flavored gelatin, canned fruit and whipped topping are not by any measure nutritionally similar to leafy greens and vegetables. Objectively speaking, this is progress. Emotionally speaking, however, I’m still tied to the idea of Jell-O salad as a legitimate side dish. I crave it at outdoor gatherings with grilled meats or any kind of chicken in a bucket. As far as I’m concerned, no potluck or backyard barbecue is complete without it.
When we recently hosted a small barbecue for Fourth of July, I set my table with homemade potato salad, a veggie salad and a tray of pistachio-lime gelatin “salad” with canned mandarins, mini-marshmallows and whipped cream. I didn’t follow a recipe; rather, I just combined a few things that had been sitting in my pantry for a long time and hoped that the end result would be palatable. Before you recoil at the idea of combining lime with pistachio, remember that they go together because they’re both green. The gelatin concoction was the approximate color of Kermit the Frog and tasted like a stick of lime Fruit Stripes gum, which is to say, scrumptiously unnatural. Its perfection was not in spite of its artificiality, but rather because of it.
The next day, I went online and found all kinds of recipes pairing lime gelatin with pistachio pudding. Most recipes had names like “Grandma’s Jell-O Salad” and other such references to the fact that apparently old people like Jell-O. Well, call me Grandma and dress me in one of those handy plastic rain bonnets that sensible older ladies carry, because I love the shimmery, jiggly, slurpy stuff. It got me thinking, however: What else could I make with Jell-O and instant pudding? The combinations are tantalizingly endless. Well, mathematically speaking, they are not endless. Jell-O brand makes 22 flavors of gelatin and nine flavors of pudding, so that’s 198 possibilities. I tried a few of them in 2020, when my pandemic boredom was reaching its peak. It was perhaps the most fun I’ve had in the kitchen, aside from setting my toaster on fire.
