Jelly Salad

Weird food: Jelly salad

FISH and chips, bangers and mash, jelly and er salad. It’s an unlikely combination but Jello Salad (salad or veg encased in fruit flavoured jellies) is a popular dish in Utah and the other Bible states in America. Served with hot meats, the concept is to combine the dressing with the salad, so that as it melts the flavours ooze onto the meat. Think it sounds a bit weird? Wondering what it tastes like? Read on…

Using a recipe for ‘Grandma’s Pineapple Cucumber Lime Jello Salad’ from Simply Recipes  the ingredients don’t sound too wacky – lime green jelly, onion, cucumber, pineapple, horseradish, salt and vinegar. It starts off well. Adding hot and cold water to the jelly, I pour it into a mould, adding cucumber and pineapple, and it looks like a refreshing summer dessert.

Key ingredients: The makings of Jelly Salad

Then I add the horseradish sauce and it begins to go horribly wrong as the luminous, green gunge curdles. It looks like the vomit of a cucumber addict who’s binged on vodka and limeade.

Green gunge: The jelly before it’s set

Unfazed, I leave the mixture to congeal, I mean set, overnight, before it’s time for the grand reveal and…

Oh God. It looks like Slimer, the green blob from Ghostbusters, in his death throes. A thick layer of yellowish, cottage-cheese-like sauce covers the top and chunks of pineapple and cucumber fight their way to the surface through the murky mixture.

The finished product: Lamb with Jelly Salad

Serving it with lamb chops and veg, I spear a piece of meat and a lump of green gunge and have my first taste of Jello Salad. The flavours are nice – zesty lime and pineapple, soothing cucumber and a zing of horseradish – and the grainy horseradish dissolves when you eat the jelly. What I find hard to stomach is eating the cold jelly with the hot meat, which makes me think I’m eating the raw rind from my chop.

Eating cold, gelatinous, sugary slivers of cucumber as one of my five a day doesn’t appeal.. I’ll leave Jelly Salad to the Americans – it’s a trifle too weird for me.