We Can Never Let This Jell-O Potato Salad See The Light Of Day Again
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Some vintage foods were awesome, like Nippy cheese on crackers, homemade beef stroganoff, and even tomato soup cake. Others were questionable, if not a total misstep, and jellied potato salad is one of those vintage side dishes that needs to stay in the past.
This dish really stretches the definition of "potato salad" — and Jell-O, for that matter. It's a collision of both worlds, a heap of jelly-laced potato salad on top of a jiggling mass of vegetable-stuffed, lemon-flavored Jell-O. And that's just one way to make a jellied potato salad. You could also mix all the ingredients for potato salad with unflavored gelatin and pop it into a Jell-O mold for a semisolid — and admittedly eye-catching — centerpiece, though the clash of textures is jarring.
Who decided to combine Jell-O and potato salad, anyway?
While something akin to what we'd call a Jell-O mold was around as far back as medieval Europe, Jell-O salads as we know them popped up on dining room tables in the early 1900s thanks to the invention of instant gelatin in the mid-to-late 1800s.
The first was a recipe for "Perfection Salad" that appeared in Better Homes & Gardens in 1904, submitted in a Knox brand-sponsored contest by a Pennsylvanian woman named Mrs. John E. Cook. It was made with gelatin and apple juice plus shredded carrots, cabbage, green pepper, and pimiento. That recipe won Cook third place in the contest and a brand-new sewing machine, but it also sparked an entire edible genre. It wasn't long before women all across America were making their own versions, dressing up convenient store-bought Jell-O with all sorts of sliced fruits and vegetables, including potatoes.
Like many vintage recipes, the original author of the recipe for jellied potato salad is unknown (and nobody seems to be fighting for the title). But the recipe is starting to occasionally pop up online and in social media videos, dug from the depths of recipe books like 1962's "Joys of Jell-O," which you can indeed buy on Amazon. It's part of a TikTok-fueled Jell-O salad resurgence. But we'd suggest you skip the potato salad and lemon Jell-O combination and focus on other things, like a classic Watergate Salad or 7 Up lime Jell-O salad.