Sweet salads are back. Don't be afraid

Food criticism served with a side of snark has a surprisingly long pedigree, one that stretches far beyond the realm of Instagram influencers, Yelp reviews or even newspapers. This kind of critique didn’t begin with the rise of food blogs or viral restaurant fails; it’s been simmering, and sometimes simmering over, for hundreds of years. Take the early 17th century, when the humble salad was unexpectedly sweet — before French haute cuisine banished sugar firmly to the dessert course.

Enter Giacomo Castelveto: an Italian Protestant who found himself exiled in England, where he could only watch with growing horror as his new countrymen boiled and mangled their salads into an absolute mess. In his book “The Fruit, Herbs & Vegetables of Italy,” he catalogs how Italians eat their produce, but not before taking a few jabs at the English salad. His critique wasn’t just culinary, but cultural, an outsider’s scorn for a practice that seemed — well. Beneath him. As if the very notion of treating vegetables in this way was an affront to his Italian sensibilities.

As food historian and author Ken Albala puts it, Castelveto essentially said: “‘These English people have no idea how to make a salad. They’re cooking the vegetables! They’re crazy. Just put oil and vinegar on and toss it. You don’t need to do anything.’ Thinking like an Italian, obviously.’”

Fast forward a few decades to 1699. That’s when John Evelyn published “Aceteria: A Discourse of Sallets,” offering a more refined dismissal of the sweetened salad. “He says, ‘People once used to put sugar on their salads, but I can’t believe how passé that is,’” Albala explains. “By the end of the 17th century, you just don’t put sugar on savory things anymore, especially not in salads. Only a ‘feminine palate’ put sugar on salad. And that stuck. Permanently.”

I can’t help but wonder what Castelveto and Evelyn, two of the patriarchs of salad orthodoxy, would make of today’s sweet salad renaissance — those jiggly, kaleidoscopic creations that, against all odds, can be as unexpectedly sophisticated as they are nostalgic. Even when chopped Snickers bars and whipped topping make an appearance. One imagines their horror deepening upon encountering “Sweet Farm!” the new cookbook from Food Network star and author Molly Yeh released in March.

It devotes an entire chapter to sweet salads, ranging from classic cookie salad to roasted rhubarb and strawberries with yogurt whip, pretzel streusel and sumac; black and white cookie salad; pomegranate coconut gelatin molds; and ube fluff.

And yet Yeh is not exactly a stranger to critique. In fact, she welcomes it. In the chapter’s introduction, she urges coastal skeptics to come down from their high horses and consider what these dishes are actually doing.

“Duff Goldman was my favorite skeptic,” Yeh told me via email. “My go-to argument is that they're good. And my second go-to argument is that there are many socially acceptable desserts that are technically cookie salads that most people have already had, like banana pudding, tiramisu and Eton mess. It’s just the name that people are getting hung up on.”

Tiramisu? A cookie salad with better PR.

That idea — that what we consider “bad taste” often says more about cultural perception than actual flavor — quietly runs throughout “Sweet Farm.” Yeh categorizes sweet salads with affection and a wink: cookie salads, Jell-O salads, candy bar salads, fluffs. And while they’re often dismissed as unserious, their DNA isn’t far from more polished, pedigreed desserts. Even panna cotta has more in common with a Jell-O salad than most food critics would care to admit.

That said, she concedes that some hesitation isn’t entirely unfounded. “I can't blame them, any genre of food where the key ingredients are Cool Whip and Jell-O would make me think twice,” she said. “But a turning point came for me when I realized how delicious and creatively satisfying these salads would be using from-scratch components like fresh whip, from-scratch cookies and unflavored gelatin with fresh fruit juices. Once I started playing around with flavor combinations that I love — like rhubarb, mint, sumac and mascarpone and black and white cookies — I realized the world is our cookie salad oyster.”

But Yeh’s not alone in recognizing the slippage between what’s considered refined and what’s deemed ridiculous.

It’s something Ken Albala came across while writing his book “The Great Gelatin Revival”—a book, it’s worth noting, he only wrote on a dare. “I don’t even like gelatin,” he told me, laughing. “I wrote all the recipes, but once the book was done, I never made Jell-O again.” Still, his research revealed a fascinating throughline: the line between highbrow and lowbrow cuisine has always been blurry, and gelatin salads are a perfect case study.

The pendulum of food taste swings wider than most of us realize. According to Albala, the sugary salad essentially disappears for a few hundred years after the late 1600s — until it returns with a jiggly vengeance in the mid-20th century.

“That’s when mayonnaise, Jell-O and marshmallows all start showing up together,” he says. “It’s a very brief period, but an unusual one.”

To understand why these sweet, processed salads took off, and then fell so hard, one has to look at what they represented. In postwar America, food science was a beacon of progress. “In the 1950s, people really trusted science — after all, science had won the war for them,” Albala said. “They were into convenience, speed, and having fun in the kitchen, embracing new inventions and technology. So putting Jell-O in a salad didn’t seem crazy at all. It wasn’t unusual; it was a way to be experimental, creative and playful with food.”

But just a couple of decades later, that optimism began to curdle. With the rise of environmental awareness in the 1960s and '70s — Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” the backlash to pesticides, the fallout from industrial agriculture — processed foods became suspect. And gelatin? Infantilized. Marketed to children and pushed out of serious culinary spaces.

“No fancy restaurant in their right mind would serve Jell-O after that,” Albala said. “It's too simple, made with artificial flavors, artificial colors and all of that.”

But that pendulum keeps swinging.

Sweet salads are back — not with irony, but with curiosity. Among them, gelatin salads are having a particular moment. Molly Yeh sees them as the gateway. “They’re so visually appealing and we live in the Instagram age,” she told me. “But also because they can easily be made boozy.”

It was that same visual seduction that first drew Peter DiMario, the co-author of “Jiggle!: A Cookbook” to the medium. “I’m not a chef,” he told me when I called him at his New York City apartment this spring. “This all happened during the pandemic. Everyone else was making banana bread and I just — got really into Jell-O.” What began as a curiosity about light and suspension, turned into something more sustained. He began hunting down old recipes, stripping out the synthetic flavors and, like Yeh, reimagining them with herbs, citrus and whole fruit.

“I was thinking of it as a medium,” he said, “more than a dish.”

His neighbors became the unwitting test audience. They learned to expect a knock at the door, a small plate of jelly left on the doormat. Sometimes it sparkled. Sometimes it slumped. “It was a process. It’s not like cooking something where you can just whip it up, taste it and adjust as you go,” he admitted. “There’s a science to it and if the balance isn’t right, you’re starting over.”

DiMario didn’t set out to write a cookbook. But when Judy Choate, a veteran collaborator on culinary projects, saw what he was making, she made a call. “If I’m good at anything, it’s predicting trends,” she told him. “And I think gelatin is going to have a resurgence.”

He dove in.

One of his early experiments was ambrosia — a salad so retro it borders on parody, but so striking in his hands it practically glows. His version suspends mandarin segments in bold pineapple-coconut cream gelatin, layered with optional coconut flakes and chopped toasted pecans (“Total family controversy,” he told me. “Some people love them, some hate them. Personally, I like them both.”)

“Ambrosia was definitely something we had at family parties growing up,” DiMario said. “I come from a big Italian family on both sides, and my grandmothers—and even my great-grandmother—were always cooking. Food has always been central to our family. It still is. Ambrosia salad was one of those things that always popped up. But then it kind of fell out of fashion. We stopped seeing it.”

He laughed. “I also remember Watergate Salad, which I didn’t include in the book—mostly because I was trying to keep everything naturally flavored. And it’s so hard to do a natural Watergate Salad. I mean, you could crack open pistachios and make your own pudding, but…” He trailed off, the implication clear: Why suffer?

Ambrosia, though, “is pretty straightforward,” he said. He found some old recipes online, including one from his mom that had originally belonged to his grandmother. “Growing up, we always had it in a big bowl on the table, but I wanted to do an unmolded version.” He added just enough unflavored gelatin to set the salad without making it too firm.

“You still want that fluffy texture everyone remembers.”

DiMario’s ambrosia, carefully unmolded and delicately set, is more than a dessert—it’s a performance of memory. The wobble, the fluff, the quiet alchemy of gelatin are all designed to evoke the version he remembers from his childhood table, just made sleeker. Just like in the Midwest, the heart of sweet salad country, the recipe is rarely the whole story.

As Minnesota-based Molly Yeh puts it, the real archive lives in the stained notecards and stories passed from one potluck to the next.

“What we lack in restaurant culture we make up in potlucks and dinner parties, and with that comes family recipes that have been made for generations,” Yeh said. “There isn't as much attention paid to cooking trends around here as much as there is to tradition, which I love. It seems like everyone around here has a recipe box with stained notecards and when you ask someone for a recipe, it comes with the story of who that recipe originated from. It has been my absolute favorite way of getting to know this region.”

For those still on the fence with sweet salad and not quite ready to commit to breaking out the gelatin mold, Yeh suggests starting simply: “Whip up some heavy cream, fold in yogurt, sweeten it however you'd like — a sprinkle of powdered sugar or drizzle of honey is nice — add whatever fresh berries you have, and then toss in any day-old baked goods that you have. It could be cookies, brownies, cake, muffins.”

The cream softens the edges; the old becomes new.

In a world where “good taste” has so often been wielded like a weapon — against women, against working-class food, against anything too sweet, too jiggly, too much — there’s something quietly radical about this kind of dessert-salad. Not the kind to win over a tasting panel, maybe. But the kind you write down on a card, tuck into the box and hope someone finds.

It’s unassuming. Generous. A little unorthodox. And I can’t help but think that if Giacomo Castelvetro and John Evelyn — those early defenders of salad purity — were handed a bowl of this, still cold from the fridge, they might pause. They might take a bite. And then, perhaps a bit sheepishly, reach for the recipe card.