Unearthing and re-creating the "company food" of yesteryear! I'll cook it, my husband will eat it, and you'll rest easy in the knowledge that your next backyard party or church potluck will be a success!
contributed by Mrs. Eric H. Spinney The Bluenose Cookbook: Famous Yarmouth Recipes
As careful readers will recall, Dr. Husband and I spent some time north of the border this summer, in Nova Scotia to be exact, exploring some little bits of Dr. Husband's foreign ancestry.
Traveling around the peninsula, one realizes that the hardy Nova Scotians will throw just about anything in a pot and eat it, an observation borne out by the types of recipes I've found in my souvenir cookbook, The Bluenose Cookbook: Famous Yarmouth Recipes, published by the Ladies' Auxiliary of the Yarmouth Y.M.C.A. Plenty of molded salads to be found here, as well as steamed vegetable puddings; fish balls, cakes, stews and chowders; extruded potato casseroles and enough fruit compotes that they could have published a book just of them.
I chose beets for today's dish because I had them on hand, and it's admittedly low risk since I've had good luck with beet/Jell-o combinations in the past. Plus, unlike the easy sell for Dr. Husband, today I'll be serving to company!
The recipe is simple as can be, but here's a friendly tip: Don't mix your ingredients in a glass bowl, precariously placed on the edge of a counter in your new kitchen that you're not used to yet. Or your first batch may end up looking something like this:
The second batch went a little more smoothly.
Beet Jello Salad - Mrs. Eric H. Spinney
1 can diced beets (15 oz.) 2 pkgs. lemon jello (3-oz. packages) 4 heaping tbsp. horseradish (that's a LOT of horseradish, friends. I used about half that.) 3 tbsp, vinegar 1 grated onion (medium)
Drain beets, add enough water to beet juice to make 3 cups. Boil this and add and dissolve jello powder. To this add remaining ingredients. Cut in squares, or use jelly molds.
Mrs. Spinney didn't instruct us to chill before cutting in squares, but I guess we're all on board with that, n'est ce pas (as they say in Canada)?
She also didn't mention the timing of adding your ingredients into the Jell-O...maybe because it's colder in Canada things set up more quickly, but I added everything all at once and found that the horseradish congregated at the bottom of the mold and the beets at the top. Nice layering effect, but if you want things more blended, let the Jell-O firm up a bit before adding things in.
Anyway, I know you're all only here for the cute video, so...
Our Rating: One Screaming Husband! (all
dishes are rated from one to five Screaming Husbands. One Screaming
Husband equals a happy home where all problems are solved during
cocktail hour. Five Screaming Husbands signals the beginning of divorce
proceedings.)
A couple of months ago, I took a stab at inventing my own gelatin salad (a trendy orange/basil/jalapeno concoction). It sounded swell on paper, honest. The results were filmed, but will likely never see the light of day; the filming happened the same day as Lime Turkey Mold, which resulted in Dr. Husband's first (and only-so-far) taste-and-purge, and so it's a bitter memory for us both.
Now, though, I feel a bit more prepared for recipe creation, and instead of trying to be all artsy-fartsy I stuck to basics, and limited myself to ingredients I had on hand.
Since it contains cabbage, this salad is obviously based on the classic Perfection Salad, a staple of church suppers and school cafeterias well into the 1970s. Perfection Salad's existence can be traced back to at least 1905, and almost always involves cabbage, and sometimes olives, pimientos, lima beans, carrots, celery, pineapple...essentially whatever old crap you might have in the icebox and want to foist off on your unsuspecting family or guests.
Usually the salad is presented in lemon or lime flavored gelatin (or, originally, in unflavored) but I didn't have either of those flavors on hand, so I went for color palate. Which brings us to the name, "Sailor's Delight". My grandmother Mrs. White, had the climatological acumen of most turn-of-the-20th-Century farmgirls of her day, and one of the surefire ways to predict tomorrow's weather was by the color of the sunrise and sunset - i.e., "Red at night, sailor's delight; Red at morning, sailors take warning." (Her method of telling when a cloudy day would turn sunny - "It'll clear up if there's enough blue in the sky to patch a Dutchboy's pants" - is not quite as reliable, I'm afraid.)
So, Sailor's Delight, because it's red. Also, the vitamin C in the beets and cabbage will prevent scurvy!
On to the recipe: 1 box (3 oz.) orange gelatin 1 box (3 oz.) cherry gelatin 2 cups boiling water 2 cups cold water 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons lemon juice 2 tablespoons vinegar 2 cups shredded cabbage 1 can beets, diced
Dissolve gelatin in boiling water. Add salt, vinegar, lemon juice, and cold water. Arrange cabbage and beets in a rectangular baking dish. Pour over gelatin mixture. Chill until firm. To serve, cut into squares; top with mayonnaise if desired.
I know what you're thinking, and quite frankly, I had my doubts too. So what did Dr. Husband think?
Our Rating: One Screaming Husband! (all
dishes are rated from one to five Screaming Husbands. One Screaming
Husband equals a happy home where all problems are solved during
cocktail hour. Five Screaming Husbands signals the beginning of divorce
proceedings.)
