When we were growing up, my mother and other ladies in our neighborhood were big on Jell-O, big on salads and really big on Jell-O salads.
If I didn’t learn anything else as a kid, I discovered that there is no limit to the number of things that can be added to Jell-O to make it into what my mother thought was a healthy salad.
She mixed all the different colors and flavors of Jell-O up with a wide variety of fruits, vegetables and other things to make assorted salads to go with her great down home meals.
Jell-O salad was never my favorite thing, but I could usually hide most of it under the remnants of other stuff on my plate like fried chicken, pork chops and pot roast.
If my mother had a favorite, go-to Jell-O salad, it would have been her concoction of green lime Jell-O with a can of that strange fruit cocktail in it.
She would serve the salad on lettuce leaves. Probably figuring that there was no way to make a mixture of lime-flavored Jell-O, canned fruit cocktail and lettuce any worse, she usually topped it with a dollop of Miracle Whip and some shredded cheese.
Jell-O was not always a part of her salads. She liked to do what she called a Waldorf salad. It had apples, celery, walnuts and raisins in it and probably some of that mayonnaise-like salad dressing.
Her Coleslaw with shredded cabbage and a little onion was always good, especially with fried fish. She made some kind of salad out of grated carrots and raisins that I always avoided.
I think about my mother’s salads this time of year when fresh tomatoes and cucumbers are in season. Those were the main ingredients in what is still my favorite salad.
She would cut up cucumbers and tomatoes that my dad grew in his back yard garden, slice an onion and let all that marinate a while in vinegar, oil, sugar and other stuff.
Regina and I try to get to the green market here early on Saturday mornings before they run out of tomatoes and cucumbers. We have them with oil and vinegar dressing like my mother use to make.
But in all the years we have been married, I don’t remember us ever having one of those salads with Jell-O in it like my mother whipped up so often.
Some of the most distasteful to me had celery, mandarin orange slices, pineapple or raspberries in them and were topped with cottage cheese. I have never eaten cottage cheese again since I got old enough to tell my mother that I just couldn’t face it.
My mother’s admiration for Jell-O based salads was perhaps best emphasized by the fact that she took them to the dinners on the grounds that were so popular at Calvary Baptist Church.
Her most requested contribution to those events was the Coke salad made with cherry flavored Jell-O, cherry juice and a Coca-Cola back in the days when Cokes came in green, six-ounce bottles.
Brother Peyden, the preacher, even praised the salad from the pulpit a time or two and mentioned how it seemed to fizz when you ate it like a carbonated beverage.
Jell-O was not just for salads. Norman Rockwell, the artist who created the distinctive covers for Saturday Evening Post magazine, deigned an advertisement for the Jell-O company calling it America’s most famous dessert.
Apparently inspired by that message, my mother quit cooking her fantastic apple pies, pineapple upside down cakes, chocolate chip cookies, divinity candy and things like that and started making Jell-O desserts that were quicker and easier.
She would put whipped cream on plain Jell-O or fix some Jell-O with marshmallows or strawberries in it and call it dessert. We protested, but she said Jell-O was better for us than pies and cakes and things like that.
Maybe she was right, because hospitals have been serving Jell-O to patients for years when they are recovering from illnesses.
Regina knows that if I’m ever in the hospital she should take me some cucumber and tomato salad with pecan pie for dessert. My mother made me eat enough Jell-O to last a lifetime.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES