You want the really weird I can give you that to, down here we eat nutria. Basically water rats.
I have no problem insulting our cuisine, but as a green ball once said " if you are going to insult me do it properly"
Tourists cannot pronounce most of the street names here and we’re fine with it. Make tourists learn new vocabulary, or at least believe they’re visiting a different country or something. If you call it cheesecake, expect them to think of it as cheesecake.
I'm from Louisiana/Texas with family in the Midwest. When we'd visit for the holidays, it was some disgusting shit. Green, opaque jello molds with random foods suspended in it, pickles and cream cheese on toothpicks, and random "salads" like the ones above. My mom (from the south) made macaroni and cheese casserole one year up there and everyone was floored
I love Cajun food, but all of the dishes pretty much taste the same with different textures. Let's not pretend like Louisiana is the mecca of cooking here.
Ahhh, Mom's pineapple cheese salad. Reminds me of when she used to handcuff us to the chairs and tell us to go ahead and scream while spooning it down our gullets. I miss her every day since the hay baler accident. Dinner just isn't the same.
I’m from small-town Iowa originally. My grandma made many of these “Midwest Salads”.
I went back for a funeral a few years ago. The was a reception/lunch at our old church. I got a serving of something that looked like jello with cream cheese on top, seemed interesting. But no, it was jello with mandarin oranges in it, and it wasn’t cream cheese, but about a quarter-inch of Miracle Whip on top, sprinkled with grated carrots. I took a bite, smiled, turned to my wife, and said, “I’m home again!”
Ha ha. I had a gf from oklahoma whose mom made an old family recipe, "Pea Salad". Of course I'd never heard of pea salad. It is cubes of cheddar cheese, chopped iceberg lettuce, canned peas, and Miracle Whip.
I'm from Germany and I know a "rice salad" that is basically the same recipe, but instead of cheddar and lettuce, you put in rice (obviously cooked) and tuna. And a little bit of vinegar before mixing it, covering the bowl, and throwing it into the fridge until cool.
That said, most people I know, including myself, think it slaps.
Yeah, according to french or german criteria, that is a salad. And I'm sure we could find some store-bought salad dressing which remind this "miracle whip".
I'm not into store-bought dressing, but this salad sound good enough for me.
Miracle Whip is pretty similar to mayonnaise, though it has some slight differences. Don't just throw any regular old salad dressing in there, because if they are similar to what I know as salad dressing, then it's certainly going to end up back here in this community.
I haven't realized there is marshmallow in it just by looking at the picture. I am not putting vinegar on marshmallow, don't worry.
I go back on my word, that is not a salad and I don't wanna eat it at all.
Seeing these “salads” fills me with the urge to quarantine the area, but also gives me that helpless, defeated feeling that the disease has already spread too far to contain.
Might I interest you in a pizza salad? It's bread or pasta, cheese and tomato sauce for a vegetable (feel free to substitute it with ketchup). There is no escape!
My joke about being from Iowa is that you could have a salad potluck without ever seeing a piece of lettuce! My family's wildest is Snicker Salad, Tapioca Salad (marshmallows and mandarin oranges), and Cranberry Salad.
Midwesterner here. Admittedly, some of these can be... interesting (to be interpreted as passive aggressively as possible). Some can be excellent though. We have a pistachio salad in the family that is a go to, and if I don't control myself I could eat a whole batch.
Ingredients include: whipped cream/Cool Whip, pistachio pudding, mini marshmallows, diced pineapple, and of course chopped pistachios. It's obviously more of a dessert/sweet side dish type of thing. Pistachios alone, though delicious, wouldn't fill the same role.
Yes, Captain. The contagion seems to be spreading rapidly. Almost as if people are finding the combination appetizing, and are perpetuating the phenomenon by way of potlucks and recipe sharing.
My husband made it for me once. Although he called it "green salad". Unfortunately I couldn't stomache more than one bite because it was insanely sweet.
At my boyfriend's request I made sweet potato casserole for the first time ever. The recipe was... something.
Basically mashed sweet potatoes with eggs and vanilla beaten in. Then a brown sugar, pecan, butter crumble topping, and then once done baking it gets mini marshmallows broiled on top.
I don't eat shit that sweet for dessert! Lol (although it's disturbing how tasty it was )
You people are all speaking about food but I don't see any recipe here. I need to taste some of these Midwest or Louisiana cuisine before I have an opinion.
I genuinely want to taste this salad. Also, if it has potatoes in it, it is a salad in my country.
I'm from the midwest. This 'salad' looks to be chunks of cheddar, pineapple, bacon, and marshmallow. If they were feeling particularly spicy, they added some mayonnaise. You honestly have no need to try this.
I definitly don't need to eat that. I'm going to make my own "sweet midwest salad" with cheddar, pineapple, potatoes and mayo.
Still it has the merit to have inspired me.
Mother is a nutritionist that used to own a restaurant, girlfriend is a nutritionist that worked 15 years in restaurants. I'm disgusted most times I discover people's family recipes...
Nothing as bad as in OP's picture, but I think a lot of people would benefit greatly from taking cooking classes (or from just trying the recipes they see people do on TV instead of just watching them to pass the time) to understand how flavours mix together and how to cook using a thermometer... Sometimes it's not even that it's truly bad, it's that every time you see someone it's the same recipe that they serve and they think it's so great when in truth it's just bland...
Why do all of these mid-west “salad” recipes have a 4-5 ingredients that seem ok, and then one god damn ingredient that is absolutely BONKERS. Like, why on earth does the cookie salad have mandarin oranges in it!? Whhhhhhyyyyyyyyyyy
Sigh… fair enough. Not going to yuck anyone’s yums, but I feel like I need to know the lore behind all of the various salads now. Is there a VaatiVidya for mid-western artery-destroying family-gathering side-dishes that I can binge watch on YouTube?
oh there's lots of videos about the rise of jello in American cuisine. i haven't seen any recently, and don't feel like going through the effort of vetting a good one right now, but yeah, just look up something along those lines. it was considered a modern miracle of food science and quite trendy for a bit there. it was also heavily featured in one or more prominent government cookbooks in like the 50s being used in this kind of way. i don't remember many of the details, but i think it was basically from a time when people were excited by new chemicals in their food and trusted scientists in s lab more than farmers in the field to make safe consistently available food. this was a similar time to wonder bread coming to popularity because flour contamination was becoming quiet prominent. we were entering a time when our population has reached modern scales, but our sanitation practices and knowledge hadn't caught up.
I think in some cases there was a random can of fruit that hadn’t been used in ages and someone was like “what do we do with this?” And bags of abandoned mini marshmallows.
The first answer, and thus one that's behind most of it, is that a lot of these originated on the back of canned goods, or other pre-packaged foods. That was sometimes more about a brand making recipes up as part of the sales push. You'd see the shit in magazines all the time when I was growing up.
The other is what applies to the non commercial recipes, or at least is what I've been told over in reddit by food historians. And that's the fact that once the idea of the weird recipes got started, people adapted them, or tried to make up their own based on what they already had. So you'd run into weird shit where someone made what seemed good to them, but it was lacking something, so they added what would seem crazy if you hadn't already had some of the strange salads already.
It works sometimes. Like the addition of pineapple to jambalaya. Or putting pickles on a peanut butter sandwich. That kind of thing where you add an ingredient that really stands out, but manages to balance things despite not necessarily going with the rest in a complementary way.
Anyway, it's pretty amazing what kind of oddball combinations end up tasting much better than they should
My parents used to take us to Furr's Cafeteria, and in the 80s they had a green Jello salad like that. I think it was... creamy somehow? Not absolutely horrible but not something I miss.
I grew up in the south, where we also have these monstrosities. If you’re the kind of person that goes to McDonald’s and thinks their sweet tea isn’t sweet enough and you also have a high tolerance for weird textures, it may be up your alley.
To be fair as someone from Louisiana.... All of you should be banned from making food
Don’t even pretend like y’all don’t have some weird shit on your menus.
Cheesecake is a bit of a misnomer. It's more like an etouffee in a crust.
Gesundheit
Congratulations, this is the funniest comment I've seen on Lemmy so far
Oh that’s just one example. Pass denied.
edit: feel free to point out weird food from here, I probably will agree.
You want the really weird I can give you that to, down here we eat nutria. Basically water rats. I have no problem insulting our cuisine, but as a green ball once said " if you are going to insult me do it properly"
Hey, I didn’t name it cheesecake, the restaurant in New Orleans did.
Because tourists from the Midwest can’t pronounce etouffee
Tourists cannot pronounce most of the street names here and we’re fine with it. Make tourists learn new vocabulary, or at least believe they’re visiting a different country or something. If you call it cheesecake, expect them to think of it as cheesecake.
Whatever that is, I'd eat it.
I'm from Louisiana/Texas with family in the Midwest. When we'd visit for the holidays, it was some disgusting shit. Green, opaque jello molds with random foods suspended in it, pickles and cream cheese on toothpicks, and random "salads" like the ones above. My mom (from the south) made macaroni and cheese casserole one year up there and everyone was floored
Were the pickles with cream cheese wrapped in ham or some other deli meat? Because those are delicious.
I'm not going to lie, yes they are, but they're not Thanksgiving food, dammit!
😀
Those are delicious anytime snacks, I’ll have you know. (Seriously, I make them once a month or so. Great low cal snack)
I love Cajun food, but all of the dishes pretty much taste the same with different textures. Let's not pretend like Louisiana is the mecca of cooking here.
I don't mean to but compared to the image above, food in Louisiana looks like a Gordon Ramsey dish
Was "All of you" not directed at "all of us", then, and instead directed only at the people making the abomination casseroles instead?
You should be more specific in your language next time.
All of you means everyone that makes that "dish". Clear enough?
Crawfish pie
Crawfish jello salad.
Oh me, oh my-oh
Ahhh, Mom's pineapple cheese salad. Reminds me of when she used to handcuff us to the chairs and tell us to go ahead and scream while spooning it down our gullets. I miss her every day since the hay baler accident. Dinner just isn't the same.
There were too many sets of fingerprints on the button, like they all pressed it at once somehow.
Ah, the classic "Et tu, Billy-bob?"
Did she force feed you nothing but sauerkraut 'till you where 26½ years old?
As long as they don't steal my lucky snorkel
I’m from small-town Iowa originally. My grandma made many of these “Midwest Salads”.
I went back for a funeral a few years ago. The was a reception/lunch at our old church. I got a serving of something that looked like jello with cream cheese on top, seemed interesting. But no, it was jello with mandarin oranges in it, and it wasn’t cream cheese, but about a quarter-inch of Miracle Whip on top, sprinkled with grated carrots. I took a bite, smiled, turned to my wife, and said, “I’m home again!”
I mean jello with fruits and whipped cream doesn't sound offensive? I guess just calling it a salad could be.
Unfortunately miracle whip is more like an odd tangy mayonnaise and it has no business in a dessert
Lol I misread it as cool whip, because who the hell would put miracle whip on that!
Cool whip still sucks compared to whipped cream, but it would still make a decent dessert. Miracle whip though, yuck
Colored me embarrassed, my culinary ignorance is showing.
Yeah, that unfortunately makes way more gross sense
You forgot that miracle whip is Satans anal palp. This message brought to you by several generations of matriachal induced trauma.
Very midwest. Sounds like my grandmother's jello with celery in it.
Ha ha. I had a gf from oklahoma whose mom made an old family recipe, "Pea Salad". Of course I'd never heard of pea salad. It is cubes of cheddar cheese, chopped iceberg lettuce, canned peas, and Miracle Whip.
That must be depression era food because it sounds depressing as hell.
I'm from Germany and I know a "rice salad" that is basically the same recipe, but instead of cheddar and lettuce, you put in rice (obviously cooked) and tuna. And a little bit of vinegar before mixing it, covering the bowl, and throwing it into the fridge until cool.
That said, most people I know, including myself, think it slaps.
Yeah, according to french or german criteria, that is a salad. And I'm sure we could find some store-bought salad dressing which remind this "miracle whip".
I'm not into store-bought dressing, but this salad sound good enough for me.
Miracle Whip is pretty similar to mayonnaise, though it has some slight differences. Don't just throw any regular old salad dressing in there, because if they are similar to what I know as salad dressing, then it's certainly going to end up back here in this community.
I haven't realized there is marshmallow in it just by looking at the picture. I am not putting vinegar on marshmallow, don't worry.
I go back on my word, that is not a salad and I don't wanna eat it at all.
Seeing these “salads” fills me with the urge to quarantine the area, but also gives me that helpless, defeated feeling that the disease has already spread too far to contain.
Might I interest you in a pizza salad? It's bread or pasta, cheese and tomato sauce for a vegetable (feel free to substitute it with ketchup). There is no escape!
My joke about being from Iowa is that you could have a salad potluck without ever seeing a piece of lettuce! My family's wildest is Snicker Salad, Tapioca Salad (marshmallows and mandarin oranges), and Cranberry Salad.
what in the actual fuck
Weirdly, while Snicker salad does have Snickers in it, the base is chopped green apples. (At least when I have seen it.)
you're fucking kidding me right?
Snickers, green apples, and cool whip
and it's fucking delicious. Just had it at Thanksgiving.
That's because it's mostly fuckin sugar mate fuckin hell 😂
...
So what does the word salad actually mean then? So far it appears to be a mix of anything, served in a large bowl.
That's pretty much it, it's not far removed from Jell-O salads with other unhealthy crap added to them.
Tapioca salad is a Thanksgiving staple in my family. Leave the canned cranberry jam at home, thanks.
And you eat them as a side to the main dish, not as a dessert. Dessert comes later
Lol, exactly! Dessert is probably healthier!
Midwesterner here. Admittedly, some of these can be... interesting (to be interpreted as passive aggressively as possible). Some can be excellent though. We have a pistachio salad in the family that is a go to, and if I don't control myself I could eat a whole batch.
Ingredients include: whipped cream/Cool Whip, pistachio pudding, mini marshmallows, diced pineapple, and of course chopped pistachios. It's obviously more of a dessert/sweet side dish type of thing. Pistachios alone, though delicious, wouldn't fill the same role.
Yes, Captain. The contagion seems to be spreading rapidly. Almost as if people are finding the combination appetizing, and are perpetuating the phenomenon by way of potlucks and recipe sharing.
My husband made it for me once. Although he called it "green salad". Unfortunately I couldn't stomache more than one bite because it was insanely sweet.
hell yeah, sign me up.
Never heard of this, wonder how it is baked on a pizza crust.
(Yes, everyone’s cries are delicious.)
No you actually made it sound good
From what I can tell, the primary ingredients are:
The first three sound great on a pizza, but the marshmallows ruin it for me.
oh those are marshmallows. I thought they were some kind of white cheese cubes.
I’d try it at least once for science.
Pineapple, cheddar cheese, mini marshmallows and pecans covered in custard.
Wait ? That's sweet ? I'm disappointed. I was dreaming about some cheesy Midwest potatoes salad. Is custard use a sauce ? That's original.
It's just sugar. Caramelize it a bit and it's dessert.
At my boyfriend's request I made sweet potato casserole for the first time ever. The recipe was... something.
Basically mashed sweet potatoes with eggs and vanilla beaten in. Then a brown sugar, pecan, butter crumble topping, and then once done baking it gets mini marshmallows broiled on top.
I don't eat shit that sweet for dessert! Lol (although it's disturbing how tasty it was )
Wait this is supposed to be the meal and not the dessert??
I was thinking it sounded delicious but main course, holy shit
"Food"
Thats the only one of these monstrosities worth the effort
Ambrosia is still the Queen of disgusting "salads"
You shut your whore mouth!
No.
I postulate an evolutionary "Crabification" of culinary science:
Everything, at the terminus of its evolutionary branch, becomes casserole.
You people are all speaking about food but I don't see any recipe here. I need to taste some of these Midwest or Louisiana cuisine before I have an opinion.
I genuinely want to taste this salad. Also, if it has potatoes in it, it is a salad in my country.
I'm from the midwest. This 'salad' looks to be chunks of cheddar, pineapple, bacon, and marshmallow. If they were feeling particularly spicy, they added some mayonnaise. You honestly have no need to try this.
I can't tell if that's bacon or some kind of nut. And because of the absolute bizarre combination already, I can't rule out either. Or both.
It's pecans. The "sauce" is pudding.
I definitly don't need to eat that. I'm going to make my own "sweet midwest salad" with cheddar, pineapple, potatoes and mayo. Still it has the merit to have inspired me.
Tastes like depression.
Both the era and the emotion.
Pizza salad: tomatoes, peppers, mushrooms, lettuce, cubed mozzarella, pepperoni slices
Combine ingredients, discard lettuce, spread ingredients over flatbread of your choice, bake
Mother is a nutritionist that used to own a restaurant, girlfriend is a nutritionist that worked 15 years in restaurants. I'm disgusted most times I discover people's family recipes...
Don't blue ball us, give us some examples
Nothing as bad as in OP's picture, but I think a lot of people would benefit greatly from taking cooking classes (or from just trying the recipes they see people do on TV instead of just watching them to pass the time) to understand how flavours mix together and how to cook using a thermometer... Sometimes it's not even that it's truly bad, it's that every time you see someone it's the same recipe that they serve and they think it's so great when in truth it's just bland...
You can have my broccoli, bacon, and raisin salad and cookie salad when you pry them from my cold hardened arteries.
Why do all of these mid-west “salad” recipes have a 4-5 ingredients that seem ok, and then one god damn ingredient that is absolutely BONKERS. Like, why on earth does the cookie salad have mandarin oranges in it!? Whhhhhhyyyyyyyyyyy
Sometimes people put pineapple in it too but that doesn’t work as well. It doesn’t sound like it should work but it does. ¯\(ツ)/¯
Sigh… fair enough. Not going to yuck anyone’s yums, but I feel like I need to know the lore behind all of the various salads now. Is there a VaatiVidya for mid-western artery-destroying family-gathering side-dishes that I can binge watch on YouTube?
oh there's lots of videos about the rise of jello in American cuisine. i haven't seen any recently, and don't feel like going through the effort of vetting a good one right now, but yeah, just look up something along those lines. it was considered a modern miracle of food science and quite trendy for a bit there. it was also heavily featured in one or more prominent government cookbooks in like the 50s being used in this kind of way. i don't remember many of the details, but i think it was basically from a time when people were excited by new chemicals in their food and trusted scientists in s lab more than farmers in the field to make safe consistently available food. this was a similar time to wonder bread coming to popularity because flour contamination was becoming quiet prominent. we were entering a time when our population has reached modern scales, but our sanitation practices and knowledge hadn't caught up.
I think in some cases there was a random can of fruit that hadn’t been used in ages and someone was like “what do we do with this?” And bags of abandoned mini marshmallows.
There's actually two answers to that.
The first answer, and thus one that's behind most of it, is that a lot of these originated on the back of canned goods, or other pre-packaged foods. That was sometimes more about a brand making recipes up as part of the sales push. You'd see the shit in magazines all the time when I was growing up.
The other is what applies to the non commercial recipes, or at least is what I've been told over in reddit by food historians. And that's the fact that once the idea of the weird recipes got started, people adapted them, or tried to make up their own based on what they already had. So you'd run into weird shit where someone made what seemed good to them, but it was lacking something, so they added what would seem crazy if you hadn't already had some of the strange salads already.
It works sometimes. Like the addition of pineapple to jambalaya. Or putting pickles on a peanut butter sandwich. That kind of thing where you add an ingredient that really stands out, but manages to balance things despite not necessarily going with the rest in a complementary way.
Anyway, it's pretty amazing what kind of oddball combinations end up tasting much better than they should
I have 2 cookbooks that are literally just, “this recipe was from the back of the box/bag for xyz product that you don’t have anymore”.
Any cold food is a salad.
Scotch eggs, sausage rolls. Serve with salad cream if there's any doubt.
Actually all food is salad.
I love day-old pizza salad
Reminds me of The Gallery of Regrettable Foods.
https://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/bhgsalad/index.html
Has anyone tried these? They look and sound disgusting but I don't want to assume.
Have had. Is gross.
My parents used to take us to Furr's Cafeteria, and in the 80s they had a green Jello salad like that. I think it was... creamy somehow? Not absolutely horrible but not something I miss.
Lol I did not
My wife's family has an orange jello salad.
Orange jello, Mandarin oranges, cool whip and some other things. It's more like a desert.
"it's more like a dessert"
Eh... Are people pretending it isn't?
I grew up in the south, where we also have these monstrosities. If you’re the kind of person that goes to McDonald’s and thinks their sweet tea isn’t sweet enough and you also have a high tolerance for weird textures, it may be up your alley.
I had one. It was insanely sweet. I couldn't eat more than one bite. It tasted like I just ate a spoonful of sugar and not much else.
Abominations
cooking with jack intensifies
Oh golly gee
Say what you want about the rest but cranberry salad goes hard
Yummy