Cauliflower Radish Salad

This midcentury beauty practically jumped off the pages of Joys of Jell-O, a fun little booklet of jello recipes published by General Foods Corporation in 1967. I originally set out to find a recipe that actually sounds edible, but I can rarely resist the allure of an off-putting salad. I don’t want to live in a Cauliflower Radish Jello-free world knowing that such a thing exists.

I love radishes and I mostly tolerate cauliflower, so only good things can come of encasing them in gelatin, right?

The Recipe

Ingredients:

1 package lemon Jell-O (3 oz.)
1/2 tsp. salt
1 cup boiling water
3/4 cup cold water
1 cup diced radishes
3/4 cup chopped raw cauliflower
4 tsp. vinegar
1 tsp. grated onion

The directions on the original recipe are very clear and easy to follow, but I’ll write them down here in case your browser has issues displaying the image above.

Dissolve Jell-O gelatin and salt in boiling water. Add cold water. Chill until very thick. Combine remaining ingredients; let stand 20 minutes to marinate. Fold into gelatin. Pour into individual molds. Chill until firm. Unmold on salad greens. Makes about 3 1/2 cups, or 6 side salads.

Here are my step-by-step directions, which are pretty much exactly the same but with additional commentary:

Combine the gelatin and salt. Boil a cup of water and add the gelatin/salt, stirring until completely dissolved. Add the cold water and stir.
You may chill it in the fridge, but my preferred method is to put the pot in a cake pan filled with ice and some cold water. I do this to chill it really fast, but also because my fridge is small. It’s at about this point in one of my food adventures that I discover that I made a jello with nowhere to put it, so I need tabletop chilling time to throw away forgotten leftovers.
While the jello is chilling, combine chopped cauliflower and radishes with the vinegar and grated onion. You can chop these as fine as you would like, but if you ever decide to actually make and eat this, I recommend chopping them small so you don’t end up with big crunchy chunks of vegetables. Let the vegetables marinate in the vinegar for 20 minutes.
If you’ve been chilling your jello on ice, 20-30 minutes should be enough time for the gelatin to thicken almost to the point of setting, but still nice and goopy. Do not let it set completely because the last thing you want to do is turn this into a whipped savory jello.
Fold in your vegetables and pour into individual molds. You could use a big mold, but little molds are definitely the way to go here. Let your jello set four hours or overnight.
Unmold and serve! The recipe suggests unmolding on lettuce, which I didn’t do because I had none. To make this as 1960s-americana as possible, use terrible lettuce like iceburg.

The Verdict

I do not know what to say about this recipe. My expectations were obviously low, so imagine my surprise when I realized that I had eaten more than half of my little individual jello before calling it a day. Don’t get me wrong, this is not good, but it was way better than I thought it would be.

The general household consensus is that this is super weird. A bite of the salad is quite literally a spoonful of raw cruciferous vegetables covered in very cold and congealed sweet lemon vinaigrette dressing, and not in a good way. Why even bother with the jello? Beyond the fun presentation, the jello adds nothing. It takes away.

That said, I can picture someone out there liking this. My son wouldn’t eat more than one bite before dramatically depositing it into the garbage can, but his friend admitted to liking it better than brussels sprouts. The adults would be willing to nibble at it politely if it were served at an elderly neighbor’s house, but they definitely wouldn’t ask for it.

Overall, strange. Two stars.