14 Old-School Jell-O Salads That No One Eats Anymore

When you look at a Jell-O salad, as a modern home cook, your first question might just be, "Why?" Or perhaps even, "How dare you?" Who in the world decided that it was a grand idea to shove as many odd ingredients as possible, along with instant gelatin, into a mold, and then present it to your dinner party guests as though it were some great culinary achievement? However, when you begin to look at all the societal forces at play during the rise of the Jell-O salad, those questions may just shift to understanding.

Instant gelatin was a product of the Industrial Revolution. It came about during a time when homemakers were beginning to rethink the idea of domestic bliss. Instant gelatin was also cheap, easy to use, and nice to look at. The Jell-O salad allowed homemakers to turn leftovers into a brand-new, economical dish that had a sort of artistic appeal. In short, Jell-O salad was popular because it ticked all the right boxes.

Despite its popularity at the time, though, the Jell-O salad didn't stick around. Its favor waned around the 1970s, though some do feel that the salads are making a comeback as of late. That said, today's chefs, and home cooks are being a little pickier with what they encase within their Jell-O. You probably won't see them making one of these old-school Jell-O salads that no one eats anymore.

Tuna salad is a great dish. Spread it on a cracker, or between two pieces of white bread. Give it some extra oomph by adding some of our favorite ingredients to give your tuna salad some crunch, like fresh veggies or almonds. One thing you're probably not going to want to add to your favorite tuna salad recipe, though, is Jell-O.

Tuna Jell-O salad is a vintage seafood dish that no one eats anymore, and for good reason. But back in the day, it came in a few forms, so those who enjoyed it got some variety. In some cases, tuna Jell-O salad would include a ring made of lime Jell-O, and in that jiggly ring would be the requisite tuna, but also ingredients like celery, peppers, olives, eggs, and chunks of Velveeta.

In other cases, you may have been treated to a more lifelike tuna Jell-O salad, formed into the shape of a tuna fish, courtesy of a tuna fish gelatin mold (because we all have one of those lying around, right?) To give said molded fish a pink, opaque hue, the particularly ambitious home chef could swap out some of the usual ingredients for a mixture of unflavored gelatin, tomato soup, cream cheese, and mayonnaise.

Sea foam salad is basically the same Jell-O salad as under-the-sea salad. The two use a lot of the same ingredients, except for one key difference that's a bit obvious once you think about the names, and look at the final products. Both salads combine pears, cream cheese, and lime Jell-O. However, under-the-sea salad requires you to make two layers of salad: one that's full-on lime Jell-O, and another that's made with cream cheese, pears, and extra gelatin. After you let the two layers sit in the fridge, you turn them upside-down out of the pan before serving, to show off the translucent, bright green, lime-flavored Jell-O atop the creamy base.

When making a sea foam salad, meanwhile, you're basically just combining all of the aforementioned ingredients together, rather than making layers, and adding whipped cream for a fluffier consistency. As such, one Jell-O salad is an under-the-sea layered delight, and the other is a foamy fluff. Both, though, can be molded, and offer a fruity, tangy flavor that — while perhaps not everyone's favorite — probably wouldn't be turned down in Salt Lake City, Utah. That's the Jell-O eating capital of the country, where people consume double the national average amount of Jell-O.

This tantalizing option combines the vintage appeal of a Jell-O salad with a favorite classic confection: Red Hots. Red Hots, a spicy cinnamon candy, was created in 1932 by the same folks who introduced the world to the Atomic Fireball, Boston Baked Beans, and Lemonheads — all old-school candies that have become unrecognizable to kids. Of those, the Red Hots may have been the only ones to find their way into a Jell-O salad.

As far as Jell-O salad recipes go, the Red Hot Jell-O salad recipe isn't too offensive. You won't find any mayonnaise or canned fish here. Instead, lemon or cherry Jell-O meets dissolved Red Hots, applesauce, and lemon-lime soda. After the Jell-O is set, it can be topped with a mixture of cream cheese, whipped cream, and mini marshmallows. You can also layer the cream cheese mixture with the Red Hot Jell-O, if you're trying to increase the visual appeal. Some recipes deviate a bit by leaving out the whipped cream, and the marshmallows, and instead mixing the cream cheese with milk, and pecans.

Midcentury cooks did not have access to the same wealth of Jell-O products that we have today. (There are currently nearly 100 products beneath the Jell-O umbrella, both gelatin, and pudding.) As such, lime became the old stand-by, and many home cooks found themselves inspired by the recipes that appeared in Jell-O advertisements. One of those recipes, published in the 1950s, was for a lime cheese salad.

Lime cheese salad is one of those savory concoctions that would raise more than a few eyebrows today. Lime Jell-O envelopes grated onion, cottage cheese, and mayonnaise, before being molded into a ring. Jell-O advised placing your un-molded ring atop a bed of lettuce, and then filling the center of the ring with — you can probably guess it — the seafood of your choice.

Myriad vintage cooking platforms taste-test recipes such as these, and one YouTube channel, OutlanDishes, tried this exact recipe in 2019. Their surprising verdict? Tuna actually does taste pretty good with lime gelatin. One commenter theorized why this might be the case: As evidenced by Rachel Green's shepherd's pie-trifle combo in "Friends," when you mix up a bunch of stuff that's good on its own, even if the combo doesn't make sense, someone's bound to like it.

If you really wanted to impress your guests in the 1950s, you may have ditched the standard ring mold in favor of something a little fancier, like a fluted or scalloped mold. One recipe that often called for a slightly fancier mold — even if it was technically still a ring mold — was the garden Jell-O salad. Promoted by a 1952 Jell-O advertisement, it was branded as a Jell-O salad that could be made up to a full day ahead of time, and that would please the entire family. The effective, albeit sexist, print ad depicted the proud mother of the family, along with her Jell-O salad, being hoisted onto her husband's shoulder as their children cheered.

So, what supposedly made this salad so magical? For one, the recipe swaps out the usual lime gelatin for lemon (which might not seem like that big of a deal today, but when Jell-O only offered six flavors, it was a big deal.) Within that lemon gelatin sits a combination of cabbage and chives that have been marinated in vinegar, and salt, plus slices of hard-boiled eggs, and sliced radishes. Occasionally, some cooks would also add shredded carrots.

Perfection salad was one of the earliest Jell-O salads out there. Some muse that its creator could be credited, at least in part, with Jell-O salad's general rise in popularity. That creator was Mrs. John E. Cook, a Pennsylvania woman who won third place, and a $100 sewing machine, in the 1904 recipe contest sponsored by Better Homes and Gardens, and Knox Gelatin.

Mrs. Cook's award-winning recipe is somewhat similar to that for the garden salad ring, but with a few key changes. She used vegetables like shredded cabbage, celery, red pepper, and green olives — but not lemon-flavored Jell-O. Instead, her recipe calls for regular gelatin but with the addition of lemon juice, and vinegar. This mixture of vegetables and gelatin is molded as part of the cooking process, but Mrs. Cook would not actually keep the salad in its molded state. Instead, she told home cooks to dice it up before serving. As for what to serve it with, her recommendations were unsurprising for the time period: mayonnaise, and seafood such as fried oysters.

You're not making Jell-O salad. You're making Jell-O blancmange. (Yeah, sure, they're basically the same thing, but doesn't blancmange sound fancier?)

Blancmange goes way, way back — much further back than the advent of instant gelatin. The first blancmange recipes that appear similar to what the dish is today appeared around the early 17^th century. At its simplest, blancmange is a mixture of unflavored gelatin, cream, milk, sugar, and almond extract, as well as possibly some fresh fruit puree — not bad, as far as a Jell-O salad goes. But keep in mind that before instant gelatin was invented, the gelatin in any blancmange would've been made the old-fashioned way, with livestock feet or fish bladders.

If you want to make this Jell-O dessert today, luckily, there's no need for you to hunt down some pig trotters. In fact, you can make this recipe even easier by using flavored Jell-O versus unflavored gelatin, and frozen fruit versus a fresh fruit puree. You can also customize the dish, opting for whatever fruit flavor you'd like.

Like the blancmange, aspics have been around for much, much longer than instant gelatin, with records of the dish dating all the way back to the 10^th century. Meats were the favored filling for aspics, as traditionally, aspics also included a meat stock base, and were in fact made possible by the natural gelatin that was extracted through boiling bone, and feet. And there was a very good reason why aspics enjoyed popularity throughout the Middle Ages: If you encased your meat or seafood in gelatin, you could keep it safe to eat for longer.

Fast-forward to the mid-1950s. As gelatin in the form of Jell-O became popular, American home cooks put their own spin on the traditional aspic. Gone were the long hours spent attempting to harvest natural gelatin, and the worries around food preservation, as that's what the new-fangled fridge was for. Instead, cooks could spend their time and energy getting creative. 

The tomato aspic salad became a favorite, thanks to the availability of instant gelatin, and also canned ingredients. Making tomato aspic salad at home requires only unflavored or lemon gelatin, a can of tomato soup or tomato juice, vinegar, hot sauce, and the vegetables of your choice. The result is a ruby-red lunchtime treat, served cold.

We often think of cafeteria food as being, well, lackluster at best. However, in the 1960s, Jell-O salads were shining bright in cafeterias across the country, such as the one on campus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where a cookbook filled with dining hall recipes was published in 1965. Among the intriguing, retro recipes included was one for Imperial Jell-O salad.

This Jell-O salad does as all great Jell-O salads are apt to do: It combines lemon Jell-O with a mix of sweet and savory ingredients. In this case, it is all about the pineapple, with both pineapple juice and crushed pineapple included, alongside stuffed olives, and celery. As one adventurous alum noted upon taste-testing the vintage recipe for the University of Wisconsin-Madison's blog, the result is not a pleasant mixture of salty, sweet, and savory flavor profiles, but is instead just a mess. The appearance isn't all that attractive, either, with the salad taking on an almost nuclear yellow-green hue.

While it's originally accredited to Glenn English, a Democratic Representative from Oklahoma in the 1970s to 1990s, the recipe for horseradish salad has been claimed by others as a family heirloom. If you've never combined horseradish with Jell-O before, what's stopping you (besides your tastebuds)?

Instead of trapping individual ingredients in a see-through ring of gelatin, horseradish salad mixes all of the ingredients together into a creamy, somewhat fluffy concoction. Those ingredients include both lemon and lime Jell-O (what a treat to get both), plus mayonnaise, crushed pineapple, cottage cheese, horseradish, and pimento. It's as if someone took all of the worst ingredients from all of the worst Jell-O salad recipes, combined them into one, and then added horseradish.

The Instagram account Cookin With Congress made, and then reviewed, this recipe in November 2025, and the verdict was rather damning. Creator Bennett Rea dramatically said, "I cannot describe the texture to you without the darkness coming in." By the look on Rea's face upon tasting the salad, that seems like an accurate summation.

This Jell-O salad might just be the most impressive of them all — at least when it comes to the actual shape, and presentation of the salad. This is no mere Jell-O ring. This is a candle. Yes, this is a real, burning candle that's one part holiday table décor, one part edible arrangement.

The recipe for this spectacular item was first published as part of a Hellmann's mayonnaise advertisement. In addition to (of course) mayonnaise, the recipe calls for cranberry sauce, lemon juice, walnuts, a peeled and diced apple or orange, and gelatin. According to the recipe, you can use whatever fruit flavor of gelatin you'd like, so long as the resulting color is red, yellow, or orange (so no lime here.)

To actually turn this mixture into a candle, you can up-cycle some empty fruit juice cans, and use those as makeshift molds. Once the candle bases are set, you simply cut a birthday candle in half, insert it into the top of the molded Jell-O, and set it ablaze for a festive finish.

One of the least offensive — and thus one of the most still readily available — Jell-O salads is the fluff salad. Fluff salad comes in a large range of flavors, but the concept is generally the same: A box of Jell-O mix (used for flavor rather than gel) meets some sort of fruit, meets whipped topping, and cottage cheese. Sometimes extra ingredients, such as miniature marshmallows or nuts, are added for texture. And while you can technically make a fluff salad with pudding mix instead of Jell-O, the latter is more closely associated with the dish.

Fluff salads are always very easy to make. They require no molding, just some mixing. They also typically need few ingredients, and little prep work, but that doesn't mean there's no room for creativity. If you were, for example, making orange fluff, you might combine your cottage cheese, whipped cream, and orange Jell-O with cans of pineapple, and mandarin oranges. Strawberry fluff would be pretty similar; just swap out your orange Jell-O for strawberry, and remove the mandarin oranges. Ambrosia salad, and Watergate salad are considered fluff salads, and they're still recognizable today.

Much like the aforementioned Red Hot Jell-O salad, the circus peanut Jell-O salad combines an old-school candy with the magic of instant gelatin. If you've never had a circus peanut before, it's basically a fluffy, bright orange, peanut-shaped candy that tastes like banana. (Don't ask why.)

The process for making circus peanut Jell-O salad is also similar to that for Red Hot Jell-O salad. You' don't keep the majority of your candy in its original form. Instead, you melt it down. From there, it's just a matter of mixing your melted peanuts with orange Jell-O, pineapple, and whipped cream.

That Midwestern Mom showed off this recipe in 2022, as part of her series on Minnesota salads that aren't really salads, and the verdict was that this is one Jell-O salad that's only for those with a serious, serious sweet tooth. One commenter on the video did, though, have the somewhat brilliant idea of making the salad in a pumpkin mold for Halloween.

Just when you think that nothing could possibly be worse than tuna Jell-O salad, along comes corned beef Jell-O salad. If you're looking for something new to serve on St. Patrick's Day, you may've just found it — and if you're looking for variety, you're in luck there, too. There's not just one corned beef salad recipe for the holiday, or for anytime at all. Rather, a Garden Club cookbook published in 1968 listed a whopping seven recipes for various types of corned beef Jell-O salad. All of them contain lemon Jell-O, but the other ingredients vary a bit. Olives, celery, onions, peppers, eggs, mayo, and Miracle Whip all make appearances.

In March 2025, That Midwestern Mom taste-tested a corned beef salad recipe that calls for corned beef, lemon Jell-O, onion, celery, Miracle Whip, and (unfortunately) whipped cream, along with a topping of pimentos, and eggs. The results were about what you'd expect, with the creator describing it as "a textural nightmare" with a flavor comparable to tuna salad.