That actually was invented in Chicago. Pizzeria Uno is a nationwide chain, but the original (and its sister restaurant, Pizzeria Due) are still around.
Sheesh! I know chow mein isn’t precisely traditional, but it isn’t too bad. Tangent: I’ve had duck soup at a noodle shop that was quite good. The place had dried pepper on the tables, (fresh, not stale, it gave the soup a goodly kick) and a wide selection of noodle dishes. I’d love to go back and eat there again sometime.
A co-worker once mentioned to me that you can learn a lot about someone’s social class position by how many dishes with jello and/or marshmallows were on the Thanksgiving menu. I immediately reassessed my social standing down a few notches.
Mainstays at home for family dinners were “bumpy jello” - red jello made with apple sauce. At more formal occasions, we often had ambrosia (yum - mandarin oranges, pineapples, coconut, and marshmallows, plus something runny) or cranberry salad (yuck - cranberries, red jello, apple chunks, nuts, maybe something else). Dessert often included pretzel salad, which was a layered thing with crushed pretzels on the bottoms, jello in the middle, and whipped cream on the top. And then, my all time favorite, the Mississippi mud cake: a fudgy/brownie-like cake topped with a layer of marshmallows and drizzled with fudge sauce.
There’s always Watergate Salad, which consists of Cool Whip, pistachio flavored pudding (just the mix), canned crushed pineapple, chopped walnuts or pecans, sliced marachino cherries, and mini marshmallows.
Anyway, it’s actually VERY tasty, if somewhat visually unappealing. We call it “the green stuff”.
I make Tday dinner more or less exactly like my mother does, but I’ve evicted the marshmallows and replaced them with cognac.
Now I’ve got class coming out of my nutsack.
My aunt makes the world’s most unbelievably delicious Jello concoction–although in our family, it’s called “pretzel Jello,” which sounds vaguely disgusting. It has a crushed pretzel basis, topped with Cool Whip and cream cheese mixed all together, topped with strawberry Jell-O with strawberry chunks in it. Delicious. At Christmas everyone politely elbows one another out of the way to get a shovelful of Pretzel Jello on their dessert plate. Nothing better.
Although in our banana pudding, we use banana pudding, not vanilla. Banana slices, Nilla wafers, atomic yellow pudding, done. If you have a nice glass bowl and a LOT of time on your hands, you can make some very intricate patterns with this dish. It’s very impressive on the potluck table.
Jello molds are also very impressive. A neighbour lady I used to know, every Christmas she always made a green jello salad in the shape of a Christmas tree, then festooned the top of it with colorful mini-marshmallows where the ornaments would be. Good eating.
Indyellen, my friend’s family makes that, except instead of calling it Watergate pudding they call it “green ambrosia.” Which is just ridiculous, because everyone knows ambrosia is oranges and pineapple and yogurt dressing and marshmallows and coconut mixed all together and served in a big opaque bowl.
I think I’m going to be sick. YUCK!
But my mother did make one thing that I used to love. She’d make cherry jello, and before it set she’d marble in vanilla pudding. I thought it was quite good.
That’s remarkably similar to the Primanti Bro’s sandwich in Pittsburgh, if you replace the cheese with coleslaw and generally make it “your choice of side dishes that we cram on there”.
Good, I’m still moving up in the class hierarchy. My parents ate Jello salads, but I don’t.
I’ve never been a Jello fan. Nowadays I associate it with being sick, like chicken noodle soup and saltines.
My mother went through a phase when I was growing up, though. The most memorable dish was “Ribbon Jello.” This was mold with thin layers alternating however many colors of Jello there are with layers of Jello mixed with, I think, cream cheese and mayonnaise. It was incredibly labor intensive for a Jello dish and took up the whole kitchen for a few hours. She made it when she wanted to make a big splash at the church potluck.
That sounds kind of good–I’d prefer orange Jello, though.
Anyone remember Jello 1-2-3? I loved that stuff as a kid…
That and regular plain old Jello (for when we were sick) are my only Jello memories (although we used to eat dried Jello right out of the box, dipping wet fingers in, at our swim meets when I was a kid). I did not grow up with Jello salad. I count this a good thing…
I love this, but you and BetsQ left out the best part. You fry the pretzels in butter first to form a crust.
Er, I’d debate that - the fruit cocktail at least is non-fat.
Honestly, I’d never heard of a single thing the OP listed. I guess we didn’t go to too many potlucks when I was growing up.
Alyson Hannigan’s character Lily, who lives in NYC, went back to St Cloud, MN with her boyfriend on How I Met Your Mother…
A musical my friend was in was a bout a bunch of people moving from Cleveland to San Francisco, and one of the lyrics a character sings to her mom is “marshmallows just don’t belong in a salad.”
Fried? Really? We crush up the pretzels and mix them with butter and bake them for a few minutes.
From the Wikipedia article: “It is sometimes included in church cookbooks and is also served at funerals.” I think they mean “served immediately before a funeral.” Yours. If you eat it. 
Really. Snickers Bars are quite disgusting enough on their own, without the assistance of Cool Whip.
Yep, I’m a Midwesterner all right, I recognize every single thing in this thread.
I bet the one you’re thinking of was something like this, cher3? I love how crooked that one is, but they rotated between layers to make it all better. 
We make it with a layer of lime w/crushed pineapple, then a layer of yellow w/cream cheese, then whatever flavor red on top, served with the obligatory whipped cream on the side.
Why is it that church basements consistently commit the most heinous culinary crimes? I have no memory of eating anything in a church (other than the wine) that was remotely edible in any form. Not that I go to church much anymore.
A few years ago I went to a funeral, and it was a sad, sad event. The deceased was a lovely person and we all hated to see her go.
Why, then, did the food have to suck ass? There were two choices: Tuna salad sandwiches and egg salad sandwiches. Those are not food. Those are excuses to throw away bread.
Well, outlaw drinking, swearing, dancing, gambling, fornicating and smoking and alls you got left is overeating, eh?
Generally like that, except it had many more layers. If she was feeling really fancy, she’d make it in some kind of mold. The moment it was to be released was always very tense.