In Defense of 7-Up Salad

 

7-Up salad is real good. 

Really, that should be enough for you people, that the fat guy endorsed it, but I understand your hesitation. It's true that nothing served at the Christmas dinners of my childhood would fit any recognized definition of that word "salad." (From the Old French salade ((14c.)) "raw herbs cut up and variously dressed," deriving from the Latin sal for salt -- so, no.) These were sweet salads we ate -- though not as desserts -- and they all start with flavored gelatin: lime, orange, yellow, red. The worst ones, the ones people remember with a shiver, had shredded carrots in them, or worse, canned peas. (I still remember putting my first foot wrong at my first bourgeois dinner party when I referred to the elaborate aspic dish as a "jello salad." The hostess, she was not amused.) The good jello salads, the best ones were layered: fruited jello, then cream cheese or "whipped topping," nuts or candied orange rind, some even had cottage cheese. The 7-Up salad was the queen among peasants: lime or lemon jello made with soda pop instead of water, mixed with crushed pineapple, then a layer of something (pistachio pudding mix?) mixed with whipped cream (that sounds wrong,) crowned by layer of cream cheese mixed with the pineapple juice and sprinkled with chopped walnuts. Kinda what I remember anyway. Something like that. I don't know the actual recipe. So sue me. It's been years.

If you didn't grow up eating jello salads that may not sound good to you. It is, but nobody's going to make you eat it. I don't think people should be made to eat anything after the age of twelve. I also think you should eat what's put in front of you or not eat at all. Old school, as they say. I have for example been to a number of what I'd call hippy dinners. Again, you may not be familiar so I'll explain. This sort of thing can put one right off one's brown rice but these were meals prepared by very evolved persons who evidently felt salt was somehow a tool of the oppressor and a spice rack a sure sign of selling out to The Man. As unlikely as it may seem now, there was a time when nearly all my friends seemed to have either braids or a mustache or braids and a mustache, men and women. Even then I drew the line at braided mustaches. They washed but did not peel their carrots. "You lose all the vitamins, man," quoth one such committed soul. They were also obsessed with lentils, the hippies. In a world full of delicious legumes this reliance on just that one humble brown bean always seemed to me punishing. Lentils in a bowl, lentils on rice, and most to be dreaded, the lightly seasoned cold lentil salad. These people never seemed to have heard of a lemon, let alone crumbled feta. Long before it became a widely accepted if still much mistaken practice, hippies thought kale should be chewed raw. And chewed. And chewed. For some, mastication for its own sake would seem to have been both a penance and a pleasure. Inexplicable. Nevertheless if even that sad dish of tepid lentils was laid before me, I et 'em. As my mother would doubtless say, "You should've left before their suppertime." 

Eating other people's food was frowned upon when I was a child. This was not xenophobic. Other people where I grew up were still largely the same ethnically uninteresting people as one's relatives. No, the issue wasn't that other people made odd meals but rather that it was impolite to linger while visiting and in so doing reduce the stock of available vitals for folks who may not have enough. Get it? Kids of course cannot tell time until they turn twenty-one so I did eat at other family's tables. The only unfamiliarity I remember was the shocking idea that other people's mothers could not cook. Not that they didn't, mind you, but some simply weren't very good at it. Once bitten twice shy you'd think, wouldn't you? Remember though, couldn't tell time, specially on long summer days so yes, I ate unbuttered corn on the cob more than once (barbarous) and mashed potatoes made without milk (thoughtless) and green tomatoes neither breaded nor fried in deep grease (some people are animals!) Perhaps the most shocking thing I ever saw growing up wasn't the drawer of sex toys a friend from a deeply religious family once showed me in his parents' bedroom, but watching someone's mother actually weighing out each "portion" appropriate to each diner according to age and size. She actually trimmed the chop to the correct children's size for a nine year old. She subtracted peas until she had the measure she intended. She used an actual kitchen scale. No lie. Science. I could not have been more horrified if we had been served my friend's little brother roasted. Presumably she would have been careful to trim the fat. "A nice, juicy baby arm but just to the elbow for you, little man." I of course could not tell my mother this story for years as her only response would have been to tell me I shouldn't have been there at that hour, or in the woman's kitchen when she was trying to make a meal. When I did finally tell Mum about that lady's kitchen scale, my mother thought a minute and then said, "Well now, maybe she had the right idea. None of them was fat." I waited out the pause before she added, "Them poor kids." 

The working class corollary to not being caught at other people's supper time was of course to feed any and everyone within the sound of my mother's voice. You could hide but she'd find you. Telling her you weren't hungry was like telling her your parents were too poor to feed you or you had undiagnosed childhood leukemia.  "Are you sick, honey? I could make you some soup." I have seen the woman all but wrestle grown men out of their moving pick-ups in order to feed them whether they wanted to eat or not. Food is love, in case you missed the memo. Don't know how many times people came to our table unannounced, but no one ever left hungry. Money was often tight in my father's house and my mother was not above pretending she'd never intended to eat that delicious pork chop herself, that she'd "tasted too much" as she cooked and was already full. Also? She would not hesitate to snatch one of her own children back into the kitchen and tell him or her that for tonight, they did not like roast beef and she'd made them extra mashed potatoes and just eat what you got and do not say a word, you hear? There was always good bread and butter if you were still hungry. Eat that. 

Every family has just the one agreed-upon potato salad person (and if you disagree not only are you probably wrong, you will clearly never be that person so give it up. So you saw this new recipe in a magazine, did you? Well, you take that right back to the car. Nobody wants to eat that mess, baby.) Likewise there was always the woman who did Christmas dinner -- and Thanksgiving usually. Just the way it worked. It wasn't fair. Nobody voted. I'm sure there were good reasons, but usually, whoever she was, she was the best cook. Nobody would say such a thing out loud, but you knew. Why? Well, other people might have bigger dining rooms for instance or a newer stove or an actual bar in the family room, and yet every year everybody came to eat in the same little house, half of them on TV trays in the living room and all the kids in the kitchen. In my family this woman was my mother. I was glad of that even if her sister-in-law wasn't happy or an aunt complained. (Nobody cares about your nice new china "going to waste." Your turkey's dry and that green bean casserole is disgusting whatever you serve it in so go cry in your beer. Your third beer, by the way. People noticed.) My grandmothers were good cooks. My mother is a good cook. My sister and my sister-in-law are both good cooks. So's my husband. I've been lucky. Mum made Thanksgiving and Christmas for years because objectively she made the best Thanksgiving and Christmas. Simple as that. People helped or they didn't. Other people brought dishes we either ate or did not. Every year my mother made the family holiday meal, even when she was cleaning other people's houses or college dorm rooms, even when she was nursing old people, or so exhausted she cried mashing the potatoes (whipped actually, using an electric  hand-mixer, with real milk, salt, pepper, and enough real butter to grease a runway -- exactly as one is supposed to do. (There are only three excuses for lumpy mashed potatoes: 1) it is 1848 and no one has electricity yet, 2) there is an actual gun to your head, or 3) you are in some fancy, post-modern steakhouse preoccupied with some inauthentic idea of  rusticality, in which case both you and the fancy-pants chef are probably douches.) My grandmas cooked the holiday meals until they didn't anymore and my mother did. My sister-in-law now makes my mother's Christmas dinner. My sister-in-law was for many years a cook and a baker in good restaurants. My brother's a lucky man too.  Anyone who cooks Christmas dinner for an extended family is a hero.

For years my husband cooked a full Thanksgiving dinner for a whole crew of mostly gay men, then a few, then a couple, and then just us. Year before last we actually ordered from a very fancy joint and it was just shit, and really expensive shit at that. I wrote a stern email -- and I sent it, 'cause I can be a hard-ass like that. Christmas was usually less of a thing for us. He was raised Jehovah's Witness, or as he's called it before, The Only Black Church with Bad Music, and the Witnesses don't do Christmas. He also worked in the USPS for decades, specifically in facilities processing packages, and I work in retail. That sort of thing can wear down the good cheer of even the jolliest of old elves. Christmas at our house tends to be quiet by choice.

My husband's full Thanksgiving menu ran as follows:

Roasted turkey, oyster stuffing, giblet-gravy, homemade mac & cheese (if you are white, please consult a black person,) greens with ham-hocks, sweet potato casserole (no marshmallows because we aren't those people,) dinner rolls from scratch, canned cranberry sauce 'cause it turns out we missed it, and sweet potato pie. 

And when the cooking and the eating were done, please enjoy a rum and Coke, and yes, even if you had wine at dinner. (Also? Buy the good liquor, people. What are we, teenagers?! My late friend Peter told me once that if you plan to drink other than alone, when in a liquor store it should hurt a little when you get to the cash register or you are doing it wrong.)

After a meal like that, after decades of meals like that, I can't say I much missed the 7-Up salad. The year I moved in with my beloved was also the last year I spent Christmas with my family. He is my family now. Took a good twenty five years for everybody else to catch up with us. It takes the time it takes, children. I'm pretty sure that at least once after that first Christmas we could call our own because we had to, my mother made 7-Up salad for me when I visited. Haven't had it since. Like so many warmly remembered things, those cold salads might not have the same charm I remember. Bought a tub of that "whipped topping" we all loved back in the day, and not just for the re-useable plastic container. Tasted the stuff on some fresh strawberries. Didn't care for it at all. Kept the container though. Maybe that makes this simpler. I know that 7-Up salad was good, whether I might eat it now or not.

Lots of things like that: comic books, The Wonderful World of Disney, county fairs, roller coasters, Republican neighbors, banana bikes on hot asphalt. Doesn't mean those things altogether ceased to be good or that other people don't enjoy them still. Really what's changed is me. My palette, my appreciation of hot weather and cold weather, my tolerance for company and crowds, what I want for Christmas, that's what is different now. Reminded of this I find I am not unmoved by the inexorable grinding of time. Can't regret it. Does no good. Time's like teeth, as you get older you just get more grateful for what you still have. Simply put, I do not feel I have the time to spend regretting or recreating my childhood. What was good I try to remember. What wasn't I try to forget. 7-Up salad was good. End of story.

I still love Christmas, still watch the same movies, listen to all the music, reread the great stories. That is the best thing about art. Unlike us, unlike food and fashion and our ever more fragile Republic, art endures. Dickens' Carol can be counted upon. Marilyn Horne singing O Come, All Ye Faithful with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Johnny Mathis in a red sweater singing anything, Alastair Sim, Rankin/Bass, The Grinch, these are all things one need not love because of what they were to us once, though we do, I do, but because they are still good of themselves, like my husband's gravy. All but the gravy will outlast me (blame the gravy) and that is a very great good indeed. That is why a good book is even better than a good dinner. Doesn't mean one shouldn't have both. Try to anyway. Try the aspic. And try the jello salads. (Not the one with the carrot shavings or the canned peas. That shit is nasty.)