Cabbage Salad.

Well, life flies by, things come up, and one's attention gets dragged away from blogs. Fortunately, the blogs stay and wait for our renewed attention. As long as we can remember the appropriate password for the account. Which I did, eventually.

Today, a warm day, I have a recipe for a cabbage salad from Aunt Carrie's recipe box. . It's a German type of salad, with a vinegar-sugar-oil boiled dressing. The card looks well-used; it must have been a favorite. Cabbage salads and coleslaws with non-mayo dressings are great for picnics or church potlucks where they can sit out longer than mayo-based salads, which go scary and bad quickly without refrigeration.

Aunt Carrie copied this recipe from the Mennonite Weekly Review, now called Mennonite World Review, a paper for Mennonites and Anabaptists in North America. Her note at the bottom, "She adds..." is, I think, a note from the submitter of the recipe. The recipe doesn't specify how much celery seed, salt and pepper to sprinkle on the vegetable layers...off the top of my head, I'd think maybe 1/2 tsp of celery seed and salt on each layer and 1/4 tsp pepper.

This recipe also has a whopping amount of sugar and I'm wondering if it would work to cut it by 1/3 or even 1/2. Todd and I love vinegary salads, so I'll have to try this with less sugar and see how it works.

Cabbage Salad  (Menn. Weekly Review)

1 sm head cabbage, shredded

1 sm onion, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped

1/2 cup salad oil
1/2 cup vinegar
1 cup sugar

Arrange cabbage, onion and pepper in bowl in layers, seasoning each layer with celery seed, salt and pepper.

Combine oil, vinegar and sugar and bring to a boil. Pour hot syrup over the cabbage mixture and let stand in refrigerator over night. Do not stir until the next morning.

She adds, This is the best cabbage salad I have ever eaten, it keeps well for several days.

Red Raspberry Salad.

I've been wanting to recreate one of Aunt Carrie's recipes and finally got some time after dinner this evening. This is one of the tastier-sounding ones, a raspberry Jello "salad" clipped from the newspaper and pasted to a 3x5" card.









Red Raspberry Salad

1 package raspberry or strawberry gelatin
1 cup boiling water
1 cup applesauce
1 package frozen raspberries or strawberries
1 cup sour cream
1 cup miniature marshmallows

Dissolve gelatin in boiling water. Add applesauce and frozen fruit. When softened, let set until firm.

Combine sour cream and marshmallows, and let set for one hour. Whip with electric mixer, then spread over chilled gelatin. Let set overnight.

As is the case with many older recipes, there's a frustrating vagueness here. What size Jello package? What size frozen fruit package? What size pan to put it all in, for that matter?

Looking at the other ingredient amounts given, I figured that the package of Jello called for was the standard 3-ounce size, and that the pan would probably be an 8x8" dish. I don't know what the size of the frozen fruit package would have been...I seem to recall seeing fruit sold in 10-ounce packages years ago, but the small sizes seem to have gone away.

I am notorious for being a recipe tweaker, meaning I can never make a recipe exactly the way it's written. I usually think I know better--and in all modesty, I am usually right! But I decided to make this exactly as written....with one change. Not a big one! I just doubled it. So: a 6-ounce package of Jello (with Ironman on the front because apparently the Avengers are selling Jello now), a 16-ounce package of fruit because that seems to be the standard size now, and I poured it into an attractive white oval dish I have that is roughly equivalent to a 9x13" pan. Doubled, the ingredients are:

1 6-ounce package of raspberry or strawberry Jello
2 cups boiling water.
2 cups applesauce (I used unsweetened)
1 16-ounce package frozen raspberries or strawberries
2 cups (16-oz container) sour cream (I used reduced-fat)
2 cups miniature marshmallows

I chose raspberries (and raspberry Jello) because I love them just a little more than I love strawberries (but not by much.) My grocery store also had a mixed bag of strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries that would make an amazing dessert, but I was trying to stick to the recipe (for once.)

The topping for this dish is a little weird. I've looked at many vintage Jello "salad" recipes, and I truly have never seen a topping of marshmallows dissolved and whipped in sour cream. I thought it sounded intriguing. You need to let the mixture sit for at least an hour before whipping it with the mixer, so the marshmallows can break down. I was impatient and so there are some small lumps of marshmallow in my topping, but they may dissolve completely as it sits in the fridge overnight. We'll try this for our Fourth of July lunch tomorrow and I'll update the taste test then.

I think some finely chopped pecans or pistachios would look lovely scattered across the topping. I might add those later.

UPDATE: We enjoyed some raspberry salad after a hot day outside on the Fourth of July. I kept expecting the sour cream/marshmallow mixture to taste like Cool Whip for some reason, but after my taste buds adjusted, I found it enjoyable. The marshmallows sweetened the sour cream slightly, but it remained tangy, and was a nice contrast to the sweet Jello. My husband said it was "delicious and refreshing," and also "a little seedy." Which was true--we don't eat seeded fruits like raspberries too often even though I do love them. (I have a little diverticulitis problem.) I didn't find the raspberry seeds too obtrusive, though. We would recommend it for a hot summer day!

Scary salads.

Aunt Carrie's recipe box has a number of salad recipes, heavy on the coleslaw and jello salads, and I'll share some of those later, but these two stand out for two reasons: they have just a list of ingredients, no real instructions, and they sound slightly horrifying.

Home economists in the early twentieth-century liked to come up with strange combinations of chopped fruits and vegetables, bound together with that processed food innovation, salad dressing. Miracle Whip was the most famous of these, a sweeter version of mayonnaise, and both began to appear ready-made in jars at about the same time. In my home growing up, we called Miracle Whip "mayo" and used it exclusively on our sandwiches and in our tuna salads. When I grew up and got my own home, I developed a distaste for Miracle Whip and came to love Hellmann's mayonnaise. My husband still prefers the "tangy zip" of Miracle Whip (to quote an old commercial) and so I keep a small jar of each for us in the fridge, in the reduced-fat versions.

Feel free to use either, should you decide to tackle one of these salads.

Salad

When I scanned this one, I wasn't even sure how to label it since it didn't really have a title, so I labeled it "Yukky Salad." (Of course then I couldn't remember what the label was when I went to find it just now.)

The card reads "Salad - Ebersoles," who must have been a family Aunt Carrie knew, maybe from church. No quantities are specified, just a list of ingredients seemingly pulled at random from one's pantry and fridge.

Carrots
Bananas
Marshmallows
Peanut Butter
Celery
-----Mayonnaise--

Odd as it is, this is a somewhat typical "salad" recipe of the kind I mentioned above. The only ingredient that looks unfamiliar to me is the peanut butter. Bananas and marshmallows, in particular, were beloved in the 1920s and 1930s as treats that went well with chopped salads and Jello salads. Bananas were tropical and exotic, and marshmallows were a novelty. I would assume here that one grates the carrots, dices the bananas and celery, and mixes all the ingredients together with a little mayonnaise dolloped on at the end, either to help bind it or as a garnish on top. Let's move on, shall we?

Carrot Salad

Salads based on grated carrots have been around for a long time. I remember my mom making a Jello salad with grated carrots and crushed pineapple suspended in orange Jello, and it was darned tasty. There's also a grated carrot salad with raisins and a sweet mayo-based dressing in one of the Barefoot Contessa cookbooks, as Ina Garten, the author, likes to delve back into the retro recipes of her youth from time to time.

Aunt Carrie notes "Radio" as the source for this salad, probably one of the many homemaker programs that were on the radio for decades in the mid-twentieth-century.

2 cups grated carrots
1/4 cup shredded coconut
1/2 cup red apples diced
1/4 cup canned pineapple cubes
Enough mayonnaise to moisten.

Honestly, I would eat this. I might squirt a little lemon juice on it to brighten up the taste and keep the apple chunks from browning. Plain or vanilla yogurt to replace the mayonnaise would probably be an excellent and much more modern taste for this salad. Not something you'd want to eat every day, but a good way to get some vitamins and fiber in the wintertime, when fresh fruits and vegetables used to be a lot harder to come by.