Carrion Luggage

Salad Days

Yes, it's St. Patrick's Day. No, I won't be doing anything special. It, like New Year's Eve, Cinco de Mayo, and other drinking holidays, are Amateur Days.

Okay, I might make my green Star Trek-inspired cocktail later, at home, but that's about it. Here it is: "It's Green" 

You know what else is green? Most salads. From Atlas Obscura's Gastro Obscura:

    Midcentury America’s Most Scandalous Salad  
According to Betty Crocker, Candle Salad was even “better than a real candle.”

Now, look. It's a huge pain in the ass to embed pics from other webpages here. It's far, far easier to implore you to click on the link in the above headline. Because that's the only way you can see a picture (actually several pictures) of this "Candle Salad" in all its proud glory. So, do that. Seriously, go click on it right now. You can even read the article; I'll only comment on a little bit of it here. But definitely look at the pictures.

In 2014, around Thanksgiving, talk-show host Ellen Degeneres showed her audience a photo of a mid-century American dish. “There’s something called a ‘Candle Salad.’ This is real,” she said, while the studio audience howled with laughter. “It is made with banana and pineapple … and mistakes. I tried it once. It was not my thing.”

Say what you will about Degeneres, but that's comedy gold, right there.

It consists of a lone banana held upright with either a pineapple base or a ring of Jell-O.

Jell-O recipes were everywhere in that era. Very successful marketing.

Personally, I think it could benefit from added kiwi fruits. Or maybe one, split in half lengthwise, and nestled at the base.

There’s a maraschino cherry on top, along with a dribble of whipped cream or mayonnaise down the side. If you use your imagination, it could be said to resemble a candle—but I bet that’s not where your brain went first.

Humans are rather predictable.

According to Aldrich, there was a pragmatic reason why this snack showed up in kid’s cookbooks. “It was a very simple recipe. Children didn’t have to worry about using a knife or burning their hands on the stove,” she says.

Yeah... I'm going to call bullshit on that. There's gotta be a huge number of "very simple recipes" that are suitable for kids of varying ages, and the overwhelming majority of those recipes aren't hentai.

Well, like I said, I'm not going to comment on the whole article, which gets into the history of thing-shaped foods (but not always that "thing"), and even provides a handy recipe so you can troll your family and/or friends yourself.