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The culinary world of the 1960s and 1970s was vastly different from today. Back then, the strange food mashups that seemingly always involved Jell-O were offered in complete sincerity by the likes of American kitchen icon Betty Crocker, General Mill’s fictional face of the domestic arts. Still, when you read some of the old recipes, you have to wonder if they were just an older version of dark cuisine — the unlikely pairing of foods that experiment with off-putting combinations — or the equivalent of a mid-century rage-bait cooking video. Case in point: the Summer Salad Pie. The name is evocative and makes one think of warm sunny days and picnics. But once you begin to read the recipe, those images turn darker, and you may find your stomach turning as well.
The recipe combines lemon Jell-O, tomato sauce, pimento-stuffed olives, tuna salad, and a cheesy pie crust. If the ingredients don’t get you then perhaps this description of what it actually tastes like will do the trick. “It kind of tasted like tuna salad on a cheese cracker that has been covered with ketchup,” the blog Mid-Century Menu wrote after actually making and consuming this abomination.
Jell-O ruled the kitchen back in the day
The recipe appeared in “Betty Crocker’s Dinner in a Dish,” which came out in 1965. The Summer Salad Pie appears in the “Main-Dish Salads” section. It wouldn’t qualify today as a salad, but back when you could smoke cigarettes in a hospital, what counted as healthy was pretty lax. This was still the era when Jell-O salad — the famous vintage three-ingredient appetizer — reigned supreme, and no one looked askance when an electric-green “salad” with olives and pickles floating in it was served at dinner. The cookbook’s writers crowed that these dishes were both salads and main dishes that “charm the eye and tempt the taste” with “delightful combinations of texture and flavor.” Different times indeed.
While there’s nothing wrong with either a sweet or savory pie, when the two collide in Betty Crocker’s kitchen it all goes horribly wrong. Imagine sinking your teeth into a piece of pie that has savory tuna salad on the top, then a sweet thick jiggly layer tasting of tomato and lemon that hides chopped up olives, onions, and celery, and finished with a cheesy crust. The book describes this dish as “pretty as can be” but we’ve seen the picture and have to strongly disagree. That said, the cherry tomato garnish does add a touch of class.
