fbpx

This week I felt like mixing together some ketchup and some cherry gelatin. Just because.

IMG_5227

This is Cherry-Catsup Salad!

AuthorRetroRuth
Rating

From Favorite Recipes From Home Economics Teachers, Salads - 1964

Tested Recipe!

ShareTweetSaveShare

 1 package cherry gelatin
 ½ cup ketchup
 1 cup boiling water
 ½ cup chopped celery
 1 cup chopped nuts
 12 small ripe olivessliced

1

Dissolve gelatin in boiling water, cool. Add remaining ingredients. Chill until firm.
Yield: 6

Ingredients

 1 package cherry gelatin
 ½ cup ketchup
 1 cup boiling water
 ½ cup chopped celery
 1 cup chopped nuts
 12 small ripe olivessliced

Directions

1

Dissolve gelatin in boiling water, cool. Add remaining ingredients. Chill until firm.
Yield: 6

Cherry-Catsup Salad

This nut-job of a recipe comes from a great book, Favorite Recipes of Home Economics Teachers Salads, that comes from a fantastic series of books. The Favorite Recipes of Home Economics Teachers, which I believe was re-published 2007, is a huge, detailed book series that collected thousands of recipes from Home Economics teachers and packed them into a bunch of themed, spiral-bound books.

There are a lot of really good recipes, recipe-box recipes and back-of-the-box favorites in these books, but there are also some very unique recipes. And some crazy ones as well. This recipe would fall into the crazy category.  But we’ve mixed ketchup and sweets before, and it actually turned out okay, so I was interested to see how this one would turn out.

 

IMG_5197

Ketchup and cherry gelatin. For daaaaaaays.

IMG_5194

So, the big red flag in this recipe isn’t, as you would suspect, the ketchup. It’s the black olives. If it had been maraschino cherries, I think we would have maybe had a fighting chance with this gelatin. But black olives in a vintage recipe always means something is trying to be savory (even when it’s not savory at all), so when you see them mixed with a sweet ingredient it is pretty much game over.

IMG_5261

Do you see what I am saying?

Tom does.

IMG_5239

IMG_5255

“Wow. That face.”

“This is…really weird.”

“So, bad?”

“Unless you like a bunch of random crap thrown together, you are not going to like this at all.”

The Verdict: Weird

From The Tasting Notes –

This didn’t go together at all. At all! If you have ever had a bite of ketchup-covered hot dog in your mouth and washed it down with a gulp of cherry Kool-Aid, then you know what this gelatin tasted like. It tasted like a bad idea. Add a bite of salad to that mouthful, and you have the complete flavor profile: A bunch of random ingredients, thrown together and suspended in gelatin. I can guess that this was supposed to be a type of side to be served with meat, like a sauce or a chutney, but I can’t think of the type of meat that this would compliment. Except for hot dogs, apparently.  In this gelatin’s defense, it had a good, crunchy texture. And it did remind us of summer through the whole hot-dog Kool-Aid thing. But other than that it was a bunch of different flavors all happening at once. And all those flavors told us ketchup and cherry gelatin do not go together well.

  |