The mere concept of aspic invites a gag reflex in many people. Add to that any wacky combination of ingredients and you have a recipe tailor-made to go viral for yuks (and yucks.)
When I first saw the recipe for “Try and Guess Salad,” my first reaction was not disgust. It was deja vu. I thought I recognized it from a local cookbook. I wasn’t sure which one. Who knows how many cookbooks I read in a year? The recipe was being shared, as so many are these days, because it sounds gross. Raspberry gelatin with stewed tomatoes… and horseradish?
And then, for a few days, “Try and Guess Salad” was everywhere. Food-centric Facebook groups and twitter accounts shared it, and everyone seemed to bond over their horror. On the reddit thread where the recipe made an appearance, commenters expressed their disdain in no uncertain terms.
Not me, of course. I imagined meat with currant sauce. Tangy horseradish. It didn’t sound great but I didn’t “wish I could unsee it” or whatever.
I searched the names of the people accompanying the image, Mrs. J. Stuart Cassilly and Helen Luedke, and I did indeed find Maryland connections. The scanned cookbook page on the internet appeared to be from a 1980s cookbook.
When I dug further, I found the recipe mentioned in the Baltimore Sun in the 1960s, when it appeared in “The Pleasure of Your Company,” a cookbook put out by St. Thomas’ Church in Garrison Forest (Owings Mills) in 1967. Contributor Mrs. James F. Colwill, neé Marion Jane Tuttle, was born in 1912 in Hastings, Minnesota before her family moved to Maryland. She married James Frederick Colwill in 1941 and died in 1988. Her “Try & Guess Salad” endured for decades – it also appeared in St. Thomas’ 1987 cookbook, “Two and Company.”
Mrs. Colwill’s Minnesota origins aside, I was convinced I had a Maryland original on my hands. I couldn’t find “Try and Guess Salad” in any earlier form elsewhere… until I thought to search for “Mystery Salad.”
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