Old-School Salads No One Makes Anymore

Few things on the dinner table can transport you to the past as easily as an old-school salad. Who doesn't have an instant memory flash of strange things suspended in Jell-O or mashed meat combined with unidentified ingredients sitting in your grandmother's finest serving dish? Some of these creations were a staple at a family potluck, while others made the holiday dinner menu into something peculiar and adventurous. Others push the definition of standard salad recipes beyond the lettuce-and-tomato basics. No matter what the occasion, old-fashioned salads had a way of indelibly marking the moment.

The further you get away from the era in which certain old-school salads ruled the table, the less likely you are to see them showing up anywhere, except maybe in movies as a kitschy nostalgic touch. Some passed because better things appeared on the horizon; others were lost to a change in regional traditions. But wouldn't it be great if you could revisit a bunch of these culinary concoctions to see what sorts of memories they evoke? With this roundup of old-fashioned salads it seems nobody makes anymore, you can do just that. Think of this salad assembly as something of a time capsule being opened for the first time in decades to remind you of what dining in days past once was. And if it inspires you to re-create one or two for a more direct experience? Well, that's even better.

It's almost too simple a combination to qualify as a salad: a mix of carrots, raisins, and dressing tossed together and presented as a side dish. Maybe that was the appeal of carrot raisin salad, something cool and refreshing that didn't take a lot of fancy ingredients and could be whipped up with little effort. All you need is a kitchen grater, a bag of carrots, a box of raisins, and the familiar mayonnaise, sour cream, and vinegar dressing so many old-school salads were subject to. If you want to get bougie with it, you can work in onions or pineapples and come up with a version that S. Truett Cathy added to the Chick-fil-A menu back in 1967. That version was retired in 2013, a sign that times were changing, and carrot raisin salad wasn't long for the world.

Suspicions about why this down-home creation was abandoned could swirl around forever, taking on the dimensions of a conspiracy. Did coleslaw step in and put the kibosh on carrots for good? Did that strange apple, grape, and yogurt salad shove carrots and raisins aside to steal the spotlight? All that can be said for sure is that if and when carrot raisin salad makes the cut at the Thanksgiving table, there are bound to be oohs and aahs at the antique charm of such a dated dish showing up unexpectedly.

All it takes is hearing the name strawberry pretzel salad for the sense memory of sinking a fork into this unusual combination for the first time. Is it a dessert, or a salad, or both? It can easily fit on either the main table or the dessert cart, thanks to the use of sliced strawberries, strawberry Jell-O, and whipped topping. And though the idea of pretzels as part of the mélange sounds like some sort of culinary accident, the salty crunch serves as a crust that doesn't require pastry know-how. Somehow, it made sense to the people who came up with the idea, as well as those who perpetuated it as a bring-along when the cousins came to town.

But when you put it all together in a single culinary equation, the math just doesn't add up. You know something is off when a salad shows up in a casserole dish or cake pan instead of the expected salad bowl. Can a salad be flat? Shouldn't there be some sort of tossing involved to get all the elements well-blended? This is one of those enigmatic creations of the salad world that defies the laws of gravity and gourmet propriety, a mind-bending morsel that may have burned brightly in its day, but now gleams in the distance like a dead star that won't make the cookout sign-up list anytime soon. Fare-thee-well, strawberry pretzel salad; we hardly knew ye.

Amish culture adds yum-yum salad to the list of nostalgic salads that have largely dropped out of sight. While the moniker yum-yum salad maybe a stretch in light of the questionable tasting notes in the bowl, the ingredients aren't too far afield from other fluff salads that made appearances in the early years of the 20th century. If the name sounds unfamiliar, imagine orange Jell-O mixed into Cool Whip with mandarin slices, pecans, and pineapple chunks joining in on the strangeness. It actually doesn't sound terrible, just overly sweet and sort of messy.

As sometimes happens with recipes that spread like folk tales across the American landscape, variations cropped up that challenged the notion of yum-yum salad. Some made sensible inclusions of fitting components like cherry pie filling and sweetened condensed milk. But a wild 1979 version shared on Reddit made the original salad more unappealing, with vinegar, shredded cheese, and pickles or olives worked into it. It sounds like home chefs lacking taste buds may have tinkered with the simpler creation until it became a Frankensalad that was better off forgotten. So much for home kitchen experimentation.

Yes, it's that Watergate, which is the only Watergate we know of, but in this instance, Watergate salad was an item that remains a mystery. It could've been on the menu at the hotel and not a recipe created as a tribute to the Nixon scandal, but its origins are not really known. Actually, depending on who you ask, Watergate salad may be a scandal of its own, one that couldn't escape the black hole of the 1980s but it sure gave the backyard cookout set a run for its money in its heyday. It was a sneaky Pete recipe that looked like a light and fluffy dessert treat, but one bite of the unusual pairing of pecans with coconut embedded in a Cool Whip and pistachio pudding mix combo (sometimes with cottage cheese to make things squishier) and you knew something was not quite right. By the time you detected marshmallows and pineapple, you were riding a sugar high it would take hours to come down from.

These days, the only place you're likely to find Watergate salad outside of your memory bank is OG cafeterias, where time stands still and foods of yore appear to be modern favorites. If you happen to see a bowl of this historic mush at a barbecue in your neighborhood, snap a picture for posterity. It may be the last time Watergate salad makes an appearance in the wild.

There's no question that when an ice cream adjacent creation like sherbet gets in on the salad groove, kids at the table are going to go gaga for whatever is in the bowl. And when orange sherbet salad makes an appearance, the old-timey ice cream vibe is in full effect, serving sludgy goodness sometimes called Dreamsicle salad, for obvious reasons; the recipe calls for orange Jell-O and vanilla pudding mix added to Cool Whip as a base for mandarin orange segments and mini marshmallows. It's all the tastes and textures of your childhood dreams swirled into a single heartthrob of a creation with the audacity to bear the mantle of "salad," when it's really more like melted ice cream served with an oversized spoon. Salad can be weird sometimes.

So why would something as decadent and kid-friendly as orange sherbet salad ever drift from the collective consciousness of the American eating public? It's no mystery that the sugar content is over the recommended limit, which may have helped it fall out of favor with the healthy eating movement of the 1980s. Better desserts also made their mark, with home bakers learning how to make trendier creations like tiramisu and red velvet cake. You may not see orange sherbet salad listed on the Chili's menu anytime soon, but just knowing it stuck a pin in the healthy salad concept in its time is a bit of a rush.

Chaos rules in the salad world, where elements are tossed together so every bite includes a little bit of everything. Not so in a layered broccoli salad, where order reigns and every aspect of what's hitting your plate is clearly delineated. The ingredients aren't so far out of pocket, a combination of broccoli florets, bacon, red onion, cheese, and pecans or walnuts with a tangy-creamy mayonnaise and vinegar-based dressing. These are pretty standard for the salad formulations of today. And yet, you never hear family members volunteering to bring a layered broccoli salad to the Fourth of July picnic. So what gives, then? Why would a tasty-sounding selection have shuffled off into the mist of dinner table selections past to become a distant memory attached to great-aunts and heirloom recipe boxes?

Maybe it's all the work involved. This isn't one of those last-minute salads, a quick mix you can throw together just as the clock chimes for the supper hour. A layered broccoli salad requires careful prep-work and a bit of refrigeration to get things in their proper places. Perhaps that's why this salad went to the back of the cookbook; too much labor is a major buzzkill in the salad world. If you have to create an artful arrangement in the bowl before everyone digs in and makes a mess of it, you're better off serving soup instead.

If you only thought of bologna as a cold cut served in the center of a sandwich, you may have missed the era in which bologna salad graced the tabletops of American homes. It isn't really a salad per se, but rather more of a mix of the familiar lunch meat either cubed or mashed together with sliced celery, pickles, and olives all spun together in a dressing made of mustard, mayonnaise, and vinegar. Some recipes call for specialty substitutes like Miracle Whip and sweet pickle relish or incorporate additional protein in the form of hard-boiled eggs. The combination of simple kitchen staples starts to form a picture of a working-class crab salad or a variation of tuna salad that switches up the flavors but offers the same versatility, to be used as a spread or served as a side dish in a bigger meal.

Like most other mixed meat dishes, bologna salad isn't exactly a healthful vittle for more thoughtful eaters to consume. Bologna itself is a mysterious mix of turkey, pork, beef, and/or chicken mashed into a meat batter that can't be disassembled for review. When you can easily grab a rotisserie chicken from Costco and shred it up for a chicken salad instead, bologna salad starts to look like a relic of the salad set. It's something that's fun to revisit when talking about the good ole days, but not something you want to incorporate into your contemporary dining plans.

Undeniably the most interesting named nostalgic dish on the menu, frog eye salad gets its name from the boba-like bits of pasta that make up the base. If you've never encountered this oddly-named creation, it consists of similar ingredients as other fluffy salads, but with the inclusion of acini di pepe pasta, which cooks up as little orbs that give soft texture and an unusual consistency to the dish. It's not for nothing that the term "frog eye" became part of the name; it's both a warning and a challenge to anyone willing to give it a taste.

Once a popular Thanksgiving side dish, frog eye slowly got the side-eye from eaters who weren't in love with the weird texture. Though the flavors were similar to ambrosia and Watergate salad, the unnecessary bubbles and unsavory name likely created associations that eventually diners didn't feel were needed in their culinary lives. So if you happen to catch a batch of frog eye salad showing up at your office food day, count yourself lucky. It's a rare sighting these days.

Was there any form or fashion that Jell-O salad couldn't take on? With its magical ability to hold just about anything in colorful suspension once chilled, the famous gelatin dessert became the transparent culprit in a mid-century salad movement that has become synonymous with overly ambitious home kitchen projects that leave diners confused and sometimes a little scared. Seeing fruit salad doing the Tom Cruise "Mission: Impossible" hover in colored gel was kind of a kick, but finding out home cooks dropped vegetables and — sometimes — meat items into the mold turned a fun fruit-flavored dish into a nightmare scenario. Shrimp in aspic may be classy, but shrimp in orange Jell-O with mayonnaise smeared on top is a horror show, and one of the biggest salad mistakes ever made.

What happened to make Jell-O salad less popular today than it was way back when? The disconcerting flexibility of Jell-O salad turned it into a pop culture punch line, with oddities floating in colorful jiggling mounds belonging to an era in which food experimentation was open book for domestic chefs hoping to zhuzh up their menus. The page couldn't turn on that phase of American cuisine fast enough. The closest thing you might find on 21^st century party tables is Jell-O shots, but at least you won't find shrimp sticking out of the cup.

It seems like peas aren't appreciated these days as much as they were in previous centuries. But there was a day when these unassuming spheres were the main attraction in creamy pea salad, a dish that certainly could have benefited from a more fanciful name. The unassuming flavor of peas calls for bolder elements like red onion and bacon to add a zesty snap to the dish, with shredded cheddar bringing in sharpness and color. And the creaminess comes from the one-two punch of mayonnaise and sour cream, and given a little tingle with apple cider vinegar. All in all, it isn't the most outrageous creation ever committed to a recipe card. But it also isn't overly appetizing to palates of the new millennium, either.

How did such a simple creation fall out of favor? As with many foods from generations gone by, it may have come to symbolize an age that younger eaters were eager to leave behind. And just about any salad with a creamy coating became suspect once diners realized they could ask for dressing on the side to control their nutrition. This may be one of those salads best kept as a memory in stories that start with the line, "Remember when grandma used to make..."

Snickers salad doesn't sound like a legit salad in any sense, but when you stop and think about tossing Snickers candy bars into a blend of whipped cream and apples, you start to realize the unexpected genius of such a concoction. It might as well have been invented by a kid who'd been given free rein in the kitchen and threw in everything that sounded good at the moment. With Cool Whip and caramel sauce tossed about in the bowl, it's an easy reach to dub this so-called salad more of a deconstructed caramel apple dessert that snuck in on the salad menu when no one was looking. It may not be everyone's taste, but it doesn't sound like the worst move in the world of culinary creativity, either.

Traditionalists may have driven Snickers salad into the sunset, confused by the "is it dessert or is it salad?" nature of the dish. But when you realize sliced Snickers pieces are one of the things you should be putting on your salad but aren't, it brings up the possibility of a Snickers salad resurgence to introduce sweets lovers to the original candy salad. If any old-school salad deserves a comeback, it's this one, even if it comes with a hearty helping of hipster kitsch.

Not all old-fashioned salads get tossed around the bowl until the ingredients can't be separated without a fair amount of work. The seven layer salad laid waste to the notion that salads have to be a whirlwind of vegetables and dressing. Instead of going hog wild with the tongs and shredding lettuce by hand, cooks labored over their slices to give them a cleaner appearance in their clear glass bowl. Shredded carrots, onions, hard-boiled eggs, and frozen peas were delicately laid on top in trifle fashion before a frosting of mayonnaise and Parmesan cheese were added to the top, decorated with a sprinkling of crumbled bacon. Sounds like a lot more work than the salad gods ever intended, doesn't it?

It may have been big in the 1950s, and it's definitely a pretty table-topper, but the seven layer salad couldn't hold up against the rustic beauty of a hand-ripped head of romaine serving as a bed for a melee of sliced veggies and a tornado of toppings. Maybe that's why cooks gave up the ghost on this pristine creation; if you aren't having a rollicking good time throwing a bunch of salad fixings in a bowl and smothering it in dressing, are you even salading? Not likely.