It was a different time

Serve with mayonnaise.

😂 There's a kind of innocent madness in this "recipe" that makes me happy.

This absolutely screams "I was zooted on lithium when I came up with this" 🫤
making the mayo optional was the only mercy to be found in this recipe.
- Keep in mind, some dude in the 50's probably came home to this expecting meat and potatoes. Say what you will about "traditional marriage", but I'd only wish this travesty on the worst of the worst.

I love how fast and loose this plays with the definition of "salad".

Right? Cover a fucking donut with mayonnaise, serve it on a single leaf of lettuce - boom, salad.
- You watch, Dunkin' Donuts will feature this next month as "healthy".
- Can't wait to see a black forest gateau salad.
In the 70s salad was any sort of combination of plant material and sauce
- Yes! Throw some crap in jello, serve on a lettuce leaf, SALAD!
- Ah no. A salad was anything combined with anything else but not cooked (again). This led to some true abominations at the table. Too often, mayonnaise (and not even mayonnaise but Miracle Whip) served as the binder.
My wife's grandma makes "pretzel salad", which is crushed pretzel sticks that are tossed with a mixture of margarine and cream cheese, I think, then baked until crispy then crumbled.

In the meantime, cream cheese, maybe whipped cream?, sugar, a few other onesies and twosies, and canned shredded pineapple are mixed into an unholy slop.

Then, when is time to serve, the crumbles are mixed in with the slop and there you go. Salad.
- Is this a side for a meal, or a dessert?
- Mmm, interesting. Pretzel salad for me is the layer of crushed pretzel and melted butter (no cream cheese here) baked, like you said, then a layer of a cream cheese frosting, then a layer of strawberries in strawberry jello. All separate layers, no unholy slop, and it's sooooo good. But no, it's not salad.
It used to mean any meal served cold. Later versions were encased in gelatin for better preservation, which contributed to the later post-war jelly salad recipes.
There is a particular category of "salad" that is basically, anything covered in mayonnaise. For example, potato salad.

The recipe actually started off halfway decent until the donuts and mayonnaise lol

It definitely sounds like some classic 1950s cooking... The only things missing are maraschino cherries and cut up hot dog weiners

Then put the whole thing in a jello mold.
"then cover everything in aspic"
No one mentions how most of the bored housewives used drugs back then. This recipe is missing jello!!
- Shoot to thrill!
It started with prunes and cottage cheese. That's already bottom of the barrel right there.
- Hey cottage cheese is fantastic. Not as an ingredient though.
And still not a salad lol, more like a dessert.

Permanently Deleted

Shit like this is why meat eaters are not convinced going vegetarian isn't a conspiracy.

This has to be fake. No one would combine these.

Post war cooking was wild.
- My Silent Gen mom was an awful cook. Casseroles every damned night, same shit over and over again, zero tolerance for creatively changing a recipe. I could see her finding this recipe and serving it over and over again.

Well I think I can confidently speak for all "meat and potatoes" men when I say that not only would this not change my mind, I think I'd never be able to look at a prune in the same way again after eating this

It would change my mind about ever spending time with this person ever again.
- No, in fact this was NOT a good meal. You get no points, and may god have mercy on your soul!
"Eating this"?

I would possibly examine, dissect and document this. But eat?

I hope that "chef" spent the rest of their life in prison.

This is how I wish we served Brevik, considering we've resolved to "take the high road" and keep him around.

I've had a little theory that post war American food is universally terrible due to everyone smoking and destroying their taste buds. Stuff starts getting better in the mid 90s when smoking rates start noticeably dropping.

Especially with coffee. People used percolators for years. You know how bad percolator coffee is? So bad that when Mr Coffee came out, it sold for about the same inflation adjusted price as a modern entry level espresso machine. It went into high end restaurants and people thought it was amazing.

I don't know if this fully works, though. Much of Western Europe had higher smoking rates for longer, and the food isn't so shit.

My guess is a combination of this and all of the lead everywhere

Adding lettuce does not a salad make. If I chop up some tomatoes and cover a cheesecake in ranch dressing, is it a salad? No, it's a crime against God and man, and restitution must be made.

I like cheesecake enough that I would wash that off in the sink and eat it.

This is just an episode of ~~Can't Cook, Won't Cook~~ Ready Steady Cook, where one of the contestants has brought in some prunes, cottage cheese, donuts and a lettuce.

I can already hear Ainsley Harriott getting unnecessarily excited.

(Edit: sorry, got my Ainsley Harriott cooking shows muddled up!)

Don't forget the mayo mentioned in the last line.
- Made me literally wtf out loud...like before that ehhh ok no but then Mayo???? Barf
can't choose the right ainsley meme face.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=ainsley+harriot+meme&iax=images&ia=images

you do it
- This one:

Growing up with food ideas like this might explain some things about boomers.

I'll stick to meat and potatoes, thanks

If I drive home from the supermarkt with some baby leafs in the trunk, does that qualify as a human-car-salad? And would that be still be legal or count as attempted (self-)cannibalism?

The "Serve with mayonnaise" got me at the end... I held it together until that point. Why was everything served with mayonnaise?

I feel like a lot of postwar US cooking could be explained by the following facts:

A Americans lived through the great depression
All Americans lived through world war rationing
A huge portion of Americans grew up in a world where things like refrigeration, grocery stores, etc didn't exist.

The end result was the food equivalent of giving a thirteen year old from the 1990s a smartphone for the first time. Just pure disgusting excess with no real rhyme or reason.

So has anyone of you tried this yet? What's your verdict?

Are you shitting me?????

Somebody alert Dylan Hollis.

“Do you think God stays in heaven because he too lives in fear of what he’s created? …here on Earth?”