Classic Midwestern "salads"

To be fair as someone from Louisiana.... All of you should be banned from making food

Don’t even pretend like y’all don’t have some weird shit on your menus.
- Cheesecake is a bit of a misnomer. It's more like an etouffee in a crust.
- Whatever that is, I'd eat it.
I'm from Louisiana/Texas with family in the Midwest. When we'd visit for the holidays, it was some disgusting shit. Green, opaque jello molds with random foods suspended in it, pickles and cream cheese on toothpicks, and random "salads" like the ones above. My mom (from the south) made macaroni and cheese casserole one year up there and everyone was floored
- Were the pickles with cream cheese wrapped in ham or some other deli meat? Because those are delicious.
I love Cajun food, but all of the dishes pretty much taste the same with different textures. Let's not pretend like Louisiana is the mecca of cooking here.
- I don't mean to but compared to the image above, food in Louisiana looks like a Gordon Ramsey dish

Ahhh, Mom's pineapple cheese salad. Reminds me of when she used to handcuff us to the chairs and tell us to go ahead and scream while spooning it down our gullets. I miss her every day since the hay baler accident. Dinner just isn't the same.

Did they ever find out who started the baler?
- There were too many sets of fingerprints on the button, like they all pressed it at once somehow.
Did she force feed you nothing but sauerkraut 'till you where 26½ years old?
- As long as they don't steal my lucky snorkel

I’m from small-town Iowa originally. My grandma made many of these “Midwest Salads”.

I went back for a funeral a few years ago. The was a reception/lunch at our old church. I got a serving of something that looked like jello with cream cheese on top, seemed interesting. But no, it was jello with mandarin oranges in it, and it wasn’t cream cheese, but about a quarter-inch of Miracle Whip on top, sprinkled with grated carrots. I took a bite, smiled, turned to my wife, and said, “I’m home again!”

I mean jello with fruits and whipped cream doesn't sound offensive? I guess just calling it a salad could be.
- Unfortunately miracle whip is more like a tangy mayonnaise and it has no business in a dessert
Very midwest. Sounds like my grandmother's jello with celery in it.

Ha ha. I had a gf from oklahoma whose mom made an old family recipe, "Pea Salad". Of course I'd never heard of pea salad. It is cubes of cheddar cheese, chopped iceberg lettuce, canned peas, and Miracle Whip.

That must be depression era food because it sounds depressing as hell.
ahhhhhhhh wtf
I'm from Germany and I know a "rice salad" that is basically the same recipe, but instead of cheddar and lettuce, you put in rice (obviously cooked) and tuna. And a little bit of vinegar before mixing it, covering the bowl, and throwing it into the fridge until cool.

That said, most people I know, including myself, think it slaps.
- So it's basically the same recipe, except 3 out of 5 ingredients are different?
- Yeah, according to french or german criteria, that is a salad. And I'm sure we could find some store-bought salad dressing which remind this "miracle whip".
  
  I'm not into store-bought dressing, but this salad sound good enough for me.

Seeing these “salads” fills me with the urge to quarantine the area, but also gives me that helpless, defeated feeling that the disease has already spread too far to contain.

Might I interest you in a pizza salad? It's bread or pasta, cheese and tomato sauce for a vegetable (feel free to substitute it with ketchup). There is no escape!

My joke about being from Iowa is that you could have a salad potluck without ever seeing a piece of lettuce! My family's wildest is Snicker Salad, Tapioca Salad (marshmallows and mandarin oranges), and Cranberry Salad.

what in the actual fuck
- Weirdly, while Snicker salad does have Snickers in it, the base is chopped green apples. (At least when I have seen it.)
And you eat them as a side to the main dish, not as a dessert. Dessert comes later
- Lol, exactly! Dessert is probably healthier!
Tapioca salad is a Thanksgiving staple in my family. Leave the canned cranberry jam at home, thanks.

Midwesterner here. Admittedly, some of these can be... interesting (to be interpreted as passive aggressively as possible). Some can be excellent though. We have a pistachio salad in the family that is a go to, and if I don't control myself I could eat a whole batch.

please elaborate on pistachio salad. why would you not just eat pistachios?
- Ingredients include: whipped cream/Cool Whip, pistachio pudding, mini marshmallows, diced pineapple, and of course chopped pistachios. It's obviously more of a dessert/sweet side dish type of thing. And clearly pistachios alone, though delicious, wouldn't fill the same role.

Pineapple cheese salad

Never heard of this, wonder how it is baked on a pizza crust.

(Yes, everyone’s cries are delicious.)

No you actually made it sound good
From what I can tell, the primary ingredients are:

Pineapple

Cheddar cheese

Crumbled bacon

Mini marshmallows

The first three sound great on a pizza, but the marshmallows ruin it for me.
- oh those are marshmallows. I thought they were some kind of white cheese cubes.
  
  I’d try it at least once for science.
- It's just sugar. Caramelize it a bit and it's dessert.
- Pineapple, cheddar cheese, mini marshmallows and pecans covered in custard.

"Food"

Where the hell is the Ambrosia?!

Thats the only one of these monstrosities worth the effort

Ambrosia is still the Queen of disgusting "salads"

You shut your removed mouth!
as a former salad cook, can confirm. ambrosia hurt my heart every day.

I postulate an evolutionary "Crabification" of culinary science:

Everything, at the terminus of its evolutionary branch, becomes casserole.

No.

You people are all speaking about food but I don't see any recipe here. I need to taste some of these Midwest or Louisiana cuisine before I have an opinion.

I genuinely want to taste this salad. Also, if it has potatoes in it, it is a salad in my country.

I'm from the midwest. This 'salad' looks to be chunks of cheddar, pineapple, bacon, and marshmallow. If they were feeling particularly spicy, they added some mayonnaise. You honestly have no need to try this.
- I can't tell if that's bacon or some kind of nut. And because of the absolute bizarre combination already, I can't rule out either. Or both.
- I definitly don't need to eat that. I'm going to make my own "sweet midwest salad" with cheddar, pineapple, potatoes and mayo. Still it has the merit to have inspired me.

Tastes like depression.

Both the era and the emotion.

Pizza salad: tomatoes, peppers, mushrooms, lettuce, cubed mozzarella, pepperoni slices

Combine ingredients, discard lettuce, spread ingredients over flatbread of your choice, bake

You can have my broccoli, bacon, and raisin salad and cookie salad when you pry them from my cold hardened arteries.

Why do all of these mid-west “salad” recipes have a 4-5 ingredients that seem ok, and then one god damn ingredient that is absolutely BONKERS. Like, why on earth does the cookie salad have mandarin oranges in it!? Whhhhhhyyyyyyyyyyy
- Sometimes people put pineapple in it too but that doesn’t work as well. It doesn’t sound like it should work but it does. ¯\(ツ)/¯
- I think in some cases there was a random can of fruit that hadn’t been used in ages and someone was like “what do we do with this?” And bags of abandoned mini marshmallows.
- There's actually two answers to that.
  
  The first answer, and thus one that's behind most of it, is that a lot of these originated on the back of canned goods, or other pre-packaged foods. That was sometimes more about a brand making recipes up as part of the sales push. You'd see the shit in magazines all the time when I was growing up.
  
  The other is what applies to the non commercial recipes, or at least is what I've been told over in reddit by food historians. And that's the fact that once the idea of the weird recipes got started, people adapted them, or tried to make up their own based on what they already had. So you'd run into weird shit where someone made what seemed good to them, but it was lacking something, so they added what would seem crazy if you hadn't already had some of the strange salads already.
  
  It works sometimes. Like the addition of pineapple to jambalaya. Or putting pickles on a peanut butter sandwich. That kind of thing where you add an ingredient that really stands out, but manages to balance things despite not necessarily going with the rest in a complementary way.
  
  Anyway, it's pretty amazing what kind of oddball combinations end up tasting much better than they should

Any cold food is a salad.

Scotch eggs, sausage rolls. Serve with salad cream if there's any doubt.

Mother is a nutritionist that used to own a restaurant, girlfriend is a nutritionist that worked 15 years in restaurants. I'm disgusted most times I discover people's family recipes...

Don't blue ball us, give us some examples
- Nothing as bad as in OP's picture, but I think a lot of people would benefit greatly from taking cooking classes (or from just trying the recipes they see people do on TV instead of just watching them to pass the time) to understand how flavours mix together and how to cook using a thermometer... Sometimes it's not even that it's truly bad, it's that every time you see someone it's the same recipe that they serve and they think it's so great when in truth it's just bland...

Reminds me of The Gallery of Regrettable Foods.

https://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/bhgsalad/index.html

What do these people call actual salads? You know, with vegetables.

Rabbit food.

Abominations

Has anyone tried these? They look and sound disgusting but I don't want to assume.

Have had. Is gross.
My parents used to take us to Furr's Cafeteria, and in the 80s they had a green Jello salad like that. I think it was... creamy somehow? Not absolutely horrible but not something I miss.
I grew up in the south, where we also have these monstrosities. If you’re the kind of person that goes to McDonald’s and thinks their sweet tea isn’t sweet enough and you also have a high tolerance for weird textures, it may be up your alley.
- Even the smell of a McD makes me feel ill, so I'd probably pass or just taste a small bit to be sure.
  
  Thanks for the olfactory description, that was really experience-able.
Lol I did not
My wife's family has an orange jello salad.

Orange jello, Mandarin oranges, cool whip and some other things. It's more like a desert.
- "it's more like a dessert"
  
  Eh... Are people pretending it isn't?
I had one. It was insanely sweet. I couldn't eat more than one bite. It tasted like I just ate a spoonful of sugar and not much else.

Oh golly gee

cooking with jack intensifies

Say what you want about the rest but cranberry salad goes hard

Yummy