alize that it wasn't a molded gelatin salad (more about that in another post). Well, I kept leafing through the Salads section and laughed out loud at some of the recipes. The food prepared for other courses may sometimes have been kind of bland, but the salads - the salads are completely different!It's as if 1940s housewives reserved all their creative cookery for this single dish... They put such imagination and artistry into their salads. What we've known - at least while I was growing up in the '70s and '80s - as the typical dinner salad (iceberg lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, celery, and radishes) had not yet been standardized. The road was still wide open and women came up
with some incredibly creative - and sometimes bizarre - combinations for the salad bowl. Fruit was still considered just as suitable for salads as were vegetables. Sometimes a cold cooked vegetable was added, sometimes the salad was molded with gelatin. Salads were often served on a bed of greens or sometimes in a tomato with the insides scooped out (or some other kind of edible "cup"). They were also served on plates instead of bowls.Salads were always assembled with an eye towards geometry. The esthetic we embrace when it comes to salads today is kind of raggedy and rustic. Sixty years ago, it was all about architecture. The Washington Salad recipe in my cookbook takes this quite literally, instructing the reader to fashion a little log cabin out of "cheese straws" and fill it with a mixture of cel
ery, artichoke hearts, cherries, and grapefruit pulp - topped it with mayonnaise. Tasty? I have no idea, but you gotta give the author points for creativity.The only rule of thumb seems to be that a salad be served cold - usually with a hearty scoop of mayonnaise! They didn't seem particularly interested, though, in adding croutons, nuts, or cheese - the fatty goodies we like to add - to their salads.
My impression is that this changed over the course of the '40s. The imaginative salads were starting to give way in the later part of the decade to your typical dinner salad. By the '50s, fruit was usually relegated to the dessert course and prepared salad dressings were taking the place of mayonnaise. I think we're coming full circle, though. Our early 21st-century salads are becoming more creative again.
Why do you suppose salads became less imaginative in postwar America?
6 comments:
I have never heard of salads molded in gelatine before; is that an American thing?
I know that when my husbands visits the USA he is amazed by the amount of cheese, creamy dressings and other fatty things that are added when he eats in restaurants.
In Australia, salads in thee 1970s were like the ones you describe, always using iceberg lettuce. Now we use all kinds of greens. At home we make a simple dressing with olive oil, garlic, balsamic vinegar and lemon juice, salt and pepper.
Kate
I really think the rise in JELLO as a brand and a dessert ended it. Before that gelatin was used in many ways and in fact in the 19th c aspic was a normal thing which is basically meat jello with veg. What is funny, though, is you'd be surprisded how good some of these salads are. I have tried some because of my project and they are good. I think, though, that their term for this type of salad may not have been INSTEAD of a lettuce based salad, as the famous caesar salad portrays. I think these veg and fruit combos were part of a meal and could and would be served with also a 'real' lettuce salad preceeding it. At least by the mid 1950s. Also, if you have never made your own mayonaise, you don't know what you are missing and it is indeed a great salad dressing.
I love reading your blog and stepping back into time. I made old fashioned vanilla pudding today. I'm always amazed when it starts to set and gets all jell-o-ey.
Kate, I have no idea whether gelatin molds were just an American thing, though it's an interesting question. I do know that they threw just about anything edible into gelatin! Yes, we've come back around these days to using some of the leafier greens that were used once upon a time. If anything, I'd say iceberg is falling out of style.
50sgal, I think you're on to something about JELLO's having moved gelatin towards the dessert table rather than the dinner table. I could be wrong, but I don't think JELLO never made a tomato flavor! I'll be avoiding all things myself made with gelatin during this project as it's an animal by-product, so I was happily surprised when I discovered that the Pear and Grape Salad didn't involve any!
The month of menus in my 1945 cookbook sometimes do include a "Tossed Greens Salad" or something more basic like a wedge of lettuce with dressing, but they never include both that and one of the weird veggie/fruit combos. This may have changed by 1955, but, a decade earlier, they seemed to stick to one cold "salad" course per meal.
It's so interesting to contrast things like this from one decade to the next. Have you found a good source for period menus?
Stephanie, congrats on the homemade pudding! You must have been longing for comfort food...
Correction: I meant to say above that I don't think JELLO ever (not "never") made a tomato flavor --- like the tomato aspic which was still popular during the '40s. Lemon was often used, too, when molded vegetables and other non-fruity things.
That is true, but I do have a tomatoe aspic recipe that I have made with plain gelatin which has cream cheese in the top. It is lovely and is much like a slice of tomato soup! It is funny how your concept of somthing will affect your idea of what something might taste like. The idea of things in gelatin often sounds horrid, but quite often is good. I guess I didn't realize you were a vegetarian, is that why you cannot use gelatin. YOu are lucky it is not REALLY 1940s because that must have been a very hard time to be a vegetarian, don't you think? Or maybe not, as you ran out of food as the war progressed, I guess you just ate what you had, and there was probably not alot of meat, I don't know, interesting to find out though! Yes, a housewife in 1945 and one in 1955 lived AGES apart when you think about it. I have a dishwasher and washing machine and dryer, blender, and more cleaning products than you would have. It must have seemed amazing, as the age I am now in 1955, I would have had to use a kitchen in 1945, being then in my twenties, it would seem like the jetsons!
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