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| Life, October 23, 1939 |
You hear a lot about June Brides, but here at Kitchen Retro we have discovered some things about one of the lesser-known of the bridal species: the October Bride. No, she doesn’t dress up in a pelican costume to serve Candy Corn to her guests in the brand-new wedding-present vegetable dishes. She is too modern for that. She is glad to be really modern. Too modern to make salad dressing, anyway. Not like all the pioneer women who spent hours shaking up gourmet dressings to go with mixed greens.
Or perhaps not.
Well, anyway, when the October Bride invites people over, she likes to amaze them with her delicious – well, I don’t know what they are. Because she calls them “Salad Bowls” - in quotations. It must be code for something else.
It is code, actually, for bowls full of Hellmann’s salad dressing. Never mind the lettuce and tomatoes. Just pour in a job lot of dressing. Don’t even look as you pour. Grit your teeth for the camera, dear. This is what October Brides do.
But if you really, really want to put something that means salad-in-quotation-marks in your so-called “Salad Bowls,” why not try this concoction from the late 1960s:
Prize Vegetable Salad (from Favorite Salad Recipes of Jaycee Wives, 1968)
1 envelope unflavored gelatin
1/2 cup cold water
12 maraschino cherries, chopped fine
1 cup cabbage, finely shredded
1 No. 2 can crushed pineapple
8 marshmallows, chopped fine
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1/2 pint cream, whipped
Dissolve gelatin in cold water; add enough boiling water to make one cup. Add cherries, cabbage, pineapple, marshmallows and mayonnaise. Fold in cream. Pour into oiled mold, chill until firm. Yield: 12 servings.
Bon appétit – and trick or treat!
Yes, indeed, what could taste fresher than something that is not home-made?And if you live in the west, and are pouring from a Hellman's bottle, you can proudly say "it's imported!"
These 1930s and 1960s salad brides may have had odd ideas about the relationship between gelatin and mayonnaise, but still they exhibited a calm sense of cheerfulness and self-sufficiency unheard of in today’s wedding reality programs. Try asking a 2010 bridezilla to do so much as touch a bottle of salad dressing on her Big Day — and then wait for the operatic meltdown!
I miss the past.