To be fair, they’re meaning the “tuna salad” or “egg salad” sense in the advertising/label copy.
Is the mix of Jello and raspberry yogurt, to make a thick smooth creamy Jello-type dessert/side a Midwest thing? My cousin’s grandmother made it every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter until she died; now I just have to hope my cousin’s aunt (I guess she’s my aunt too, being my uncle-by-marriage’s sister) makes it on the holidays I’m home for. Sadly, she doesn’t that much.
It’s the only Jello dish I will eat both voluntarily and frequently- even plain berry Jello on its own I’m not a huge fan of.
I’m from Southern California, and I recognize a lot of these dishes. (Grandmother was from Utah.)
After my grandmother died, it was up to my mother and me to carry on her traditional holiday cooking. We dug out her recipes, including one for lime jello salad. It included lime jello, cottage cheese, pineapple, sour cream, and horseradish. Horseradish in jello! The horror!
I’m not sure any of you have plumbed the depths of 50’s foods.
James Lileks has, in his Gallery of Regrettable Food.
Here’s a picture that will cause the most jaded miswesterner to pause. It starts with gelatin…
I’m sure most of you yuppie scum could afford Jello, but for some of us there was only knox blox.
That’s right, we couldn’t afford the miracle of modern chemistry and artificial and natural flavoring… we had plain gelatin, and made do.
I do make one jello thing: Raspberry jello, whipped with a package of cream cheese before it sets. Nothing else added. It’s really good.
Now, the ancestral yams-with-brown-sugar-and-marshmallows, however… yuk!
I make butternut squash pureed with roasted garlic and asiago cheese, instead. It is always demolished.
Oh, and instead of plain cranberry sauce, I make cranberry “salsa”: Chopped green onions, cilantro, and jalapeno, using whole-berry sauce. Unless you have that weird anti-cilantro gene, it’s killer delicious.
Eh, I’m talking about staple foods where everything has mayo and cool whip in it whether it needs it or not; where you turn sugar and more sugar (snickers and cool whip) into a “salad” by throwing in more sugar and fiber (apples); and where instead of shredding carrots onto a bed of greens, you shred them into a blob of empty calories. Which did not make it any more palatable, btw – crunchy jello was gross even when I kinda sorta liked jello.
Also, maybe it was different where you grew up, but jello salads were not “dessert,” they were “salad.” Dessert frequently also came along later in the meal.
Hey, I even still like seven-layer salad, but I’m not going to pretend that eating something with that much mayo is “healthy” just because it also contains lettuce and peas.
Which reminds me… lettuce growing up? Iceberg, invariably. I didn’t even know til I was halfway through high school that lettuce came in other varieties. Or that iceberg was basically a big nutritional zero. Or that you could even eat other green leafy things that had way more flavor than your standard bed-o-iceberg did. No wonder I hated salads as a kid. (My favorite salads still consist mainly of spring mixes, mesclun, and/or spinach. Once I tried it, I never went back. 
)
Why, for the love of all the gods, why??
As I remember it, Knox Blox weren’t a poor man’s Jello; they were Jello as finger food. To a kid, having Jello you could actually pick up and eat with your hands made it so much cooler!
But man o man, throw a chicken or beef bullion cube in there…and oh baby we are talkin some high falutin living now!
[Grandma] You need to eat your roughage! [/Grandma]
And if anyone wants to make Snickers Salad- don’t use Lite Cool Whip like my Nebraska neighbor. Yech.
I make this by request for my family for potlucks. But instead of Cool Whip, I use Miracle Whip. Gives it that extra tang. It’s an old family receipe. How’d you get it?