Food Fight

I doubt Grand Saline had ever seen anything like it. Here in this small East Texas town, known mostly for its huge rock salt deposits, a Connecticut doctor had brought his mother’s ashes for burial next to her husband and two stillborn children. He also brought his soon-to-be husband, the first selectman of Harwinton. The good doctor and I have been closest friends since college in Austin, Texas, so there I was under a funeral tent on a warm April morning in 2009. We read the loving and erudite program, heard short eulogies of his mother, Ruth, then listened to a recording of Janet Baker’s incomparable rendition of “I Am Lost to the World” from Gustav Mahler’s Ruckert Lieder. In German. All firsts for Grand Saline. But the lunch that followed at the Methodist Church was all Texas. We come-to-be Easterners might know about Mahler, but these women — members of Ruth’s 92-year-old sister’s Sunday school class — knew about funeral lunches. Great platters of fried chicken and ham sat amid bowls of potato salad, cole slaw, corn pudding, baked pinto beans, hot cornbread and biscuits, three pies and two cakes. And down at the end of the laden table, all alone, was what I wanted most: the mandatory congealed salad. Now it is mighty strange to me that Yankees are so repelled by those words: congealed salad. They want to substitute timid “Jell-O” or effete “gelatin.” It won’t do. Congealed is more encompassing, more in your face. It includes salads both sweet and savory, salads made with all kinds of jelled liquid — Coke, Dr. Pepper, juices, broths, water — and ingredients — fruit, shredded cabbage, shredded chicken, cottage cheese, grated cheese, olives, cherries, pimento. I have eaten them all. But what waited in Grand Saline was a congealed salad like no other. “What is in this?” I asked. “It’s delicious,” added the doctor. “Well,” replied the delighted Methodist lady, “just pretzels, Cool Whip, cream cheese, strawberry Jell-O and frozen strawberries.” Pretzels for the crust? Surely not. The taste was nuttier, more like pecans. And that layer was crisp, not soggy from the cheese and Cool Whip. Well, dear readers, since Grand Saline I have learned that this pretzel salad has swept the South, recipes for it abound on all the food websites. I have eaten it three times at the doctor’s house, watched the reaction of other guests — surprise then pleasure, but refusal to call it a salad, which is OK with me since it could be a dessert, too. And most recently I have observed the, dare I say hilarious, efforts of Compass Editor Marsden Epworth, a New York City native, to make it. But I’ll let her tell that story herself. — LGAh yes. The congealed salad. Leon Graham speaks often of Southern delicacies he has known: Cake made with Coca-Cola, or was that gravy made with Coca-Cola?; pudding made with corn; cheese balls crusted with pecans. But it was the congealed salad that caught my attention. I could not believe this fellow who lingers over sweetbreads had a place in his heart for Jell-O pie. No. I am not snooty. Or picky. I eat what’s around and that has included sea cucumbers (better than you think), jellyfish, chicken feet, (much better than you think), tree ears, fish cheeks and, God help me, dog, black dog, a guilty specialty in wintertime Beijing. I’ll eat anything, but it seemed to me that this dish made of Jell-O, Cool Whip and pretzels was one of those interesting Post War dishes dreamed up for housewives of the 1950s, wearing page boys, stockings and frilly aprons, gleefully tending to the appetites of hubby and 2.6 offspring as pictured in Ladies’ Home Journal. Even then, when it actually was the 1950s, I took a dim view of this jolliness. That was largely because my friends’ mothers did not behave as pictured. Nor, certainly, did mine. Food was a chore at my house. Not an event. My mother would dish up the required meat and veg for me and my sister and disappear before we started kicking each other under the dining room table. Not gleeful at all. But one day, when I was 9, I opened Dione Lucas’s cookbook and made a lemon meringue pie.Yes, it was an authentic, arduous and very untidy undertaking, and, yes, the meringue wept a little and threatened to slip off the tangy golden curd, but my mother and sister and I sat on the living room couch and ate the whole thing together. For dinner. With spoons. Right out of the pie plate. It cheered us. And no other lemon meringue pie has ever come close. Well, back to congealed salads, I am dismayed by the efforts of Big Pharma producing polysorbates, say, monostearates, sodium polyphosphates, maltodextrin, disodium phosphate — the stuff of Cool Whip and of Jell-O. That’s not food. That’s chemistry. Still, Leon raved about this congealed salad. So I made it. But it went wrong. Yes. Like many people who try a friend’s recipe, I dickered. I used orange Jell-O instead of strawberry. I used less Cool Whip and more cream cheese than I was supposed to and I flavored that with a little Grand Marnier. The pretzel crust was chunkier than it should have been. And I used fresh instead of frozen strawberries. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong. Leon was disappointed. I might even say indignant. This was not the dish he has enjoyed with friends in Harwinton. No. Nor did it stir recollections of a funeral luncheon in East Texas. It was different, not right, disappointing. And that is because food is a lot more than taste and texture and smells. It’s not about recipes either, or technique or even ingredients. Sometimes it’s about memories and history and expectations. It’s about people you love and times that can never be repeated. And you just cannot mess with those things. Not ever. Never. — ME