It’s hard to recognize when it’s time to say good-bye.
That’s especially the case with our traditional family holiday foods, when leaving one off the dinner table seems sacrilegious, a slap in the face to the women of generations past who made and served them without fail.
However, I now see that after years of inescapable proof, it’s time to loosen the hold on the cranberry mold.
(I had no such compunction about cancelling out that awful green bean casserole, which my grandmother made and my mother made and I never could stand – and I am aware it’s still somewhat popular today.)
My mother and I always loved cranberry mold. It’s a ringed Jell-o salad shaped in a metal mold with a pretty pattern. The bottom was a dense raspberry-flavored gelatin of chopped walnuts, cranberries and celery flavored with crushed pineapple, and the gelled top was a delicious tangy-sweet mayonnaise-sour cream mixture sweetened with pineapple juice.
I made cranberry mold and all my mother’s other classics without fail for all my holidays at home from my very first year of being independent.
Oddly, my cranberry molds in those first years always came out perfectly formed and glistened enticingly on the table. It’s only been over the past five or 10 years that I’ve had trouble getting the gelatin out of the mold and once or twice even getting the gelatin to set properly, so the presentation has not been as flawless.
Also over the past several years, fewer and fewer dinner guests even eat it. Some get slim slices — just to be polite, I guess.
So after every holiday dinner I’m stuck with a very large cranberry mold ring that takes up too much space in the refrigerator and gets mostly thrown out after a few days since there isn’t anyone besides me who eats it anyway.
Last week Davis Scott made ambrosia for the Martinsville-Henry County Historical Society’s board of directors Christmas dinner. Davis is the Historical Society’s youngest board member – a college student – so for someone so young to make ambrosia counts indeed as a nod to history.
Ambrosia, supposedly the food of the gods, made the rounds in the 1970s. It is canned fruit cocktail, Mandarin oranges and maraschino cherries stirred with flaked coconut and perhaps halved grapes, mini-marshmallows and maybe some cream. A few weeks ago, I saw it listed in a cute little online article called “15 Food from the 1970s No One Eats Anymore.”
I told Davis about that article and reminisced about my mother making ambrosia that long ago, and I hadn’t seen it since.
“Like Waldorf salad!” he chimed in.
Wait – what?! Is Waldorf salad out, too?
My mother always made Waldorf salad by combining chopped apples, grapes, celery and walnuts and stirring in mayonnaise.
Waldorf salad was the other cold dish on my childhood Thanksgiving and Christmas tables all those years ago, and like the cranberry mold, I’ve been making it religiously ever since. And unlike the cranberry mold, some guests at my dinner table do eat it.
But come to think of it, I don’t believe I’ve ever come across Waldorf salad on anyone else’s table, though I’ve seen a sweeter version of it at a restaurant or two.
Well, we can still take a break from cranberry mold but don’t have to leave the cranberry mold off the holiday table forever. Perhaps it can reappear every few years, just to keep that memory alive.
It can swap turns with Waldorf salad.
