California Prune Cream Salad, 1934 – A Mid-Century Gelatin Recipe Test - Mid-Century Menu (2024)

Jelly (as Jello was traditionally called and is still called in the UK) is a centuries old dish, and it was one enjoyed only by the wealthiest people in society. Jellies were both sweet and savory. They were very expensive and very difficult and very time-consuming, really requiring the skills and equipment of a professional chef. Jelly is basically a meat by-product food, and often included other expensive ingredients (e.g. sugar for the sweet jellies). To make the elaborate jellies of earlier centuries required great skill, special molds, and most of all, a way to chill the jelly to make it set. This was no simple task.

When refrigeration became common in American homes starting in the 1920s and jellies became commercially available in an easy, ready-to-make mix, average people suddenly had access to what was once a rare and expensive food. They obviously made the most of these new commercial developments with many jelly recipes, both sweet and savory, enjoying what was once a treat of the upper classes only. All these strange (to us) jelly dishes of the mid-century were really not so strange in the larger context of history. Not that that makes some of them any more palatable.

All true! But gelatins weren’t the only thing that rose in popularity due to refrigeration. All salad making was given a huge boost. Even for green salads, many recipes read “chill bowls to ice cold” or “best served in chilled bowls”, something home cooks hadn’t been able to do year round.

It was an exciting time to be a home cook!

Rats, I should have had him take a picture of me. I am pretty sure I spat my bite out. Yuck.

You know, now that you mention it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Tom spit food out once it is in his mouth. Ever. Wow, kind of blowing my mind here.

Do it, do it, do it!

And send pictures! 🙂

Oh, old menus are the best. I adore them. They are great serving ideas and tips. I also use them for helping to recreate what sides commonly went with certain main dishes.

And yes, no one needs try prune cream salad. No one.

Wow . . . that’s really disgusting. What amazes me is that someone not only thought up that hideous mixture, but felt confident enough that it was actually GOOD that they wrote it down.

Reminds me of an old SNL skit in which people aren’t sure if milk has gone bad or not, so they take turns drinking it. “Uuuugh, yes . . . that is A-mmonia! Here, taste it!” 🙂

OK, do. not. make. things. with. prunes.

I applaud you both.

I recall some Moroccan beef dish I tried that had ras al hanout in it and also prunes. It was pretty good but the prunes, though they had apparently disintegrated in cooking, were I think the reason I didn’t save leftovers.

Or maybe it’s that ras al hanout sounds like a Batman villain, but I blame the prunes.

True, cottage cheese and mayonnaise were as trendy as gelatin back in the day.

My grandmother still likes to mix ketchup and mayonnaise together as dressing for a lettuce salad.

The prune chocolate cake doesn’t sound so bad now, I bet!

When you think about it, we do live in amazing times. Agriculture has been built up so we can get fresh vegetables of so many varieties, all the time. You can go to the grocery store and be disappointed when some small, random item is unavailable, but think of everything that is there! I’m a child of the 70s and remember when you couldn’t get fresh pineapple in the stores all the time, and the only lettuce was iceberg, and tomatoes were pink in the winter. (I live in a northern state and we have tasty hydroponic tomatoes at the stores now, grown within 100 miles of my home, year round – it’s kind of a miracle. I mean, they aren’t as good as the ones from the garden, but they are a lot better than the pink ones.) We were lucky to find one or two shapes of pasta, and Old El Paso taco kits, and La Choy chinese food kits. They didn’t have the selection of salsa and Oriental sauces and Italian delicacies they have now. There were only two or three flavors of chips, for heaven’s sake. And ice cream came in cube shaped boxes… anyway… yeah, I’m old.

I think that was the mid century obsession with jello and cold stuff – refrigeration was new, they were trying to sell all sorts of fun new products and get people to use their new appliances for more than just waiting for the milkman. “You can keep the rest of the jar of mayo, the rest of your cream, the remaining pickles, and the rest of the cottage cheese in your fridge next to this vomit-flavored salad!” Though containers were a lot smaller than, maybe this used the whole thing. Plus, they had access to lots of different types of food all year round, for the first time.

Sorry for the diatribe. This got me thinking!

I think I read all the comments and I didnt see a-one talking about the purported laxative “benefit” of prunes! I’m too young to have experienced this directly, but as a kid I read a lot, often books that were written MUCH earlier than I realized at the time (this was the eighties, and Beverly Cleary’s books, for example, were written in the fifties! Even Judy blume’s books were written early enough that “Are you there God it’s me Margaret” terrified me into thinking that when I got my period I’d need to wear some kind of belt).

ANYWAY, tangent aside, I seem to recall prunes and prune juice often referred to as solutions to constipation (obliquely) and as something old people were evidently required to drink. In fact, I probably *did* witness prune juice in some elderly fridge, but that might have been in the seventies.

Perhaps in a day when there was no understanding of fiber’s role in the diet and the importance of hydration, and no reliable nostrums, constipation was both ubiquitous and (ha!) insoluble, leaving prunes as the only viable option. However, since they were associated with the unlovely bowels, prunes would never actually be delicious, they may have intrinsically been sort of punishing, so eating something as vomitus as this recipe was merely to be expected. After all, who said medicine should taste good?