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.”
Under that name, the recipe was popularized as “Peggy’s Mystery Salad” in the 1963 “Blueberry Hill Menu Cookbook” by Elsie Masterton. Masterton and her husband had opened a ski resort in the 1940s, only to face a lack of snow. Masterton instead transformed the Inn into a culinary destination and summer resort. The Blueberry Hill Menu Cookbook was Masterton’s fourth book.
Coincidentally, a Peggy Jo Gates appeared in the 1950 census at Blueberry Hill with the Mastertons. I spent a great deal of time researching Gates, who was from Kansas, for possible further connections to the Mastertons other than a census-concurrent stay at the Inn. I dug up everything I could find about Peggy Jo Gates. Unless there were two Peggy Jo Gateses born in 1922 from Kansas working in television in Manhattan, she appeared in both the Vermont and New York censuses that year!
I ordered a copy of the Blueberry Hill Menu Cookbook. In it, Masterton asserted that the recipe had been handed to her by one of her culinary students, Peggy, “last year,” which would mean 1960-1962. “Peggy” was from St. Paul, Minnesota. Well then. Perhaps Peggy from Kansas was just a red herring. (Peggy Gates was just one of a dozen involved parties who I unnecessarily researched and genealogy-d.)
At any rate, the recipe appeared in a California newspaper a year before the Blueberry Hill Menu Cookbook came out. Mrs. J. Patrick Crowe from San Marino submitted “Mystery Salad” to a local recipe column.
The trail goes cold.
Whether the salad was from Minnesota or California, Marylanders in the Baltimore area seem to have latched onto it and it appears in multiple cookbooks in my collection.
One remarkable thing about this dish is that – name change aside – the actual formula was not changed by anyone who copied the recipe. You’d think there’d be adjustments here and there for taste, seasonings… anything. But no. Everyone deemed Mystery/Try-And-Guess Salad to be just perfect as it was, and copied and shared it accordingly.
Recipe:
Recipe from “The Pleasure of Your Company: a second collection of recipes,” the Women of St. Thomas’ Church, Garrison Forest, 1967