SALAD DAYS
Baked beans, marshmallows, fruit cocktail, flavored gelatin, grated American cheese, ginger ale, sauerkraut . . . Do the words “salad fixings” spring to mind?
Probably not, but then you aren’t a well-bred, middle-class lady living in the first half of the 20th century. Had you been reared on the tenets of the domestic science movement that dominated American cooking at that time, such a list would indeed have suggested salad. As a “progressive housekeeper,” you would have cringed at the very idea of what we call salad today.
As culinary historian Laura Shapiro has detailed in Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century, vegetables had to be tamed, and the very best way to render untidy raw vegetables harmless was to encase them in gelatin. After molding and chilling her salad, she could gild the lily with a few stuffed prunes, rococo swirls of thinned mayonnaise, and a carved tomato tulip.
Pretzel salad is a direct descendent of such “Festive for Special Occasions Salads,” as Betty Crocker’s New Picture Cook Book grouped similar concoctions as late as 1961. Even today, despite the Cool Whip and the strawberry Jell-O, pretzel salad is not dessertit’s a salad.