Five-cup salad, aka can-can salad, millionaire salad, and ambrosia, is a kitsch classic that comes in countless variations, the one ironclad rule being that none of its ingredients can be fresh. That’s the vital subtext of this pseudosalad: Nature, as expressed in such unruly tangled stuff as lettuce and forbiddingly crunchy things like carrots and radishes (not to mention smelly veined cheese), is inferior to the smooth and palliative comforts of culinary technology. Once a popular offering at ladies lunch (back when ladies lunched), it endures as an ingenuous tradition in heartland cafeterias and at festive family dinners that demand something pretty and sweet and not the least bit challenging either to cook or diner. The recipe’s pillars are sour cream, canned pineapple (crushed or chunked), and shredded coconut. To this trio may be added mandarin orange slices, maraschino cherries, fruit cocktail, miniature marshmallows, chopped walnuts, shredded American cheese, Cool Whip, and (at Easter only) multi-colored Fun Mallows.
Five-Cup Salad
Throughout much of the heartland, the word salad does not necessarily mean green leafy things and virtuous vegetables. A salad can be any sort of refreshing side dish that is not an entree or vegetable. Some such salads are so sweet that they could pass as dessert—Five-Cup Salad being a prime example.
1 cup shredded coconut
1 cup mandarin oranges, drained
1 cup crushed pineapple, drained
1 cup sour cream
1 cup miniature marshmallows
Combine all ingredients.
4–6 SERVINGS