Retro Cook-Off: Swedish Salad Mold

Donna at Hung Up On Retro and Kylie at Lucy Violet Vintage are co-hosting a Retro Cook-Off Saturday at noon...Melbourne, Australia time. To make up for the 20-hour time difference, I'm posting this at 8 o'clock on Friday night, rather than my usual midnight.

I found my recipe for Swedish Salad Mold on Joys of Jello, and I want to give blogger Theresa Rohrer all the blame credit for it! :) Her post is entitled "When Spam Meets Jello," and I think that just about says it all. Here is a picture of the finished dish from a 1952 edition of American Home Magazine.

joysofjello.blogspot.com

And here's the recipe, which conveniently has dotted lines around it so you can print it and cut it out for your collection in the event that this retro dish looks really tasty to you.

I will confess, however, that I made a few modifications to the original recipe. I bought an extra can of Spam...because, I mean, the more Spam the better, right? And I left out the black olives, because, to be honest, about halfway through the preparation of this dish, the smell of Spam was making me slightly nauseous, and I decided it would be nothing short of criminal to encase an innocent can of olives in a urine-colored gelatinous mass. With Spam. And pickles. After all, the olives were just sitting in the pantry minding their own business.

joysofjello.blogspot.com

This cook-off allowed me to test my limits in several areas, not the least of which involved my ability to manage my gag reflex. I also found out that being artsy and craftsy doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be good at sculpting pickles or decorating gelatin molds. In both areas, I found myself sadly limited. Maybe it was the nausea.

And don't let me forget to tell you about going to the refrigerator to see if the concoction was "slightly thickened" and sloshing it all over my kitchen floor. Suffice it to say that it was not even remotely thickened.

Anyway, without further ado, here is my entry of Swedish Salad Mold for the Retro Cook-Off. Don't even ask about the blob of white stuff. Trust me, you don't want to know.

Swedish Salad Mold

Swedish Salad Mold,
with apologies to anyone from Sweden,
anyone of Swedish descent
or anyone who has ever even considered a vacation in Sweden

If you're wondering about the two-tone appearance of my salad, I can explain. You see, even after adding the extra Spam, I didn't have enough of the gelatin mixture to fill the mold (which was really a Bundt cake pan, since I realized a long time ago how vile these recipes are and sold all my Jello molds). The only thing I had in my pantry that was even close to the color of the unflavored gelatin mixture was some orange sugar-free Jello, so there's a slightly runny layer of that at the bottom...and, if you're going to get technical about it, I suppose some seeped around the edges of the top layer and "blotchy" is a more accurate description, but "two-tone" sounded more mid-century. Hey, some people love sweet and savory!

It might be fair to say the orange layer was a  little more than runny.
Most of it fell off during slicing.

So let the competition begin! I think it may be difficult for anyone to top my dish in sheer ugliness, let alone hideous taste, and I fully expect to hear from angry Swedes denying any culpability for the recipe.

Check out Donna's and Kylie's blogs to see what the rest of the participants prepared.