Angel Salad 101

All right, let's get to it: as Mary Ellen so sagely asked on yesterday's post, what IS angel salad?

The short answer is that angel salad is a dish my family considers an integral part of Thanksgiving. It isn't Thanksgiving if you don't have angel salad on the table, with the turkey and all its companions. Period. The end.

The story goes* that Grandma found the recipe in the Farm Journal, back when my mother was a kid (though whether it was presented as a Thanksgiving dish there, or whether she made it so, I don't know). We have my grandfather's sisters to thank for being persistent about getting the recipe, which Grandma did not want to give out: she wanted it to be her signature dish. They kept pestering her, though, and thank heavens they did, because otherwise, the recipe would have been lost in the fire when the house burned (which happened when my mother was a teenager). And ever since, we've been making it with every turkey dinner.
*I'm sure someone will correct me if I have it wrong.

In the spirit of sharing recipes so they aren't lost, here's how it's made. Edited to add the amounts, so you can play along at home. I wasn't trying to be coy or secretive, I promise! It's just that, no matter how lyrical I wax about this dish, it is (objectively) an odd thing to insist on with turkey, and I didn't think anyone was going to want to try it blind. So far, my success has been with sneaking it up on people until they are hooked. But if you are brave, welcome! Please let me know if you try it, and what you think.

My notes:

• Best to make it the night before Thanksgiving, to give it time to chill completely.
• Set the pineapple to drain Wednesday morning.
• If you’re one of those nut people, you can add ¼-½ cup chopped walnuts or pecans at the pineapple stage—but I don’t advise it!
• Mini marshmallows melt faster, but the regular ones are fine too.
• The recipe can be doubled, tripled, quadrupled … depends how many of the faithful are coming!

Ingredients; this is what I call a single recipe.

2 Tablespoons butter

4 egg yolks, beaten

1 Tablespoon sugar

¼ cup milk

2 Tablespoons cider vinegar

½ teaspoon salt

1 bag of marshmallows

1 cup heavy cream, whipped

20 oz can crushed pineapple, well drained

• Ahead of time (usually Wednesday morning), drain crushed pineapple.
• The night before Thanksgiving: start with butter over low heat in a fairly heavy pan, then add combined egg yolks, sugar, cider vinegar (no, really!), milk, and salt. Cook until it thickens, about 5 minutes.
• Add marshmallows and stir until they're dissolved, every last bit; about 6 minutes.
• At this point you take it off the heat (off the stove altogether if the oven's on) and leave it to get down to room temperature (but not cold, because it will solidify).
• When it's about ready, whip heavy cream, then fold the cooled mixture into it.
• Fold the mix into the pineapple. In the interests of honesty, I will admit that the recipe calls for nuts, walnuts or pecans, and they get mixed in at the same time. When I make it, there are no nuts involved, because I like it better this way. Recipe evolution.
• Pour into your serving dish(es), garnish with maraschino cherries if desired, and chill.

(Speaking of the cherries, when I was at the store and went to get them, the store was out. Rather, they were out of red ones, though they did have green ones on the shelf. Green! I was appalled: obviously, they're supposed to be red. I found cherries in the ice-cream-sundae supply area, and when I got home I searched the internet for the answer to green maraschino cherries. What I learned was even worse: they're mint flavored! Ugh! Thank heavens I didn't get them. Who wants green, mint-flavored maraschino cherries? I do not understand the world sometimes.)

If you're me, by the way, you save the pineapple juice to drink with your egg-white omelet for breakfast the next morning. Thrifty and delicious!

What angel salad is not:

• Dessert. I know, you'd think it would be, but it just isn't. Turkey+stuffing+mashed potatoes+angel salad=Thanksgiving, the end.
• Photogenic. You really can't blame all the people over the years who took a no-thank-you helping of this stuff.

It isn't even attractive. I know. Trust me, I know. If I was faced with this for the first time as an adult, I probably wouldn't want to try it either. It's pale, it's sort of ... lumpy-looking. I know. I don't even always put the cherries on top, but it's an attempt to liven it up a little. Once you taste it, you won't care.

When I moved back to MA ten years ago (ohmagah, it's been ten years), I was invited to spend Thanksgiving with family friends. I asked if I could please bring angel salad, explaining that for me, Thanksgiving dinner isn't complete without it, no one else has to eat any, but please can I bring it? And of course they said yes. And over the years, more people have tried it, and more of them have liked it, and at the end of dinner last year, they let it be known that if I wanted to bring more next year, that would be all right. I went home smiling, and put "double angel salad!" on the calendar for yesterday.

I expect my mother probably made a double recipe when I was a kid, the years when it was just the four of us. What I really remember is the time that her brother's family joined us for the holiday, and for the eight of us, Mum made a quadruple recipe. Now that's a lot of work! A lot of stirring, mostly. With that branded on my memory, a single recipe never seemed like that much work. I thought a double recipe would feel like more, but when it's a year since you've made it, the details get blurry, and double didn't seem like that much work, either. And it's so worth it.

Thus endeth the lesson. Go forth and sup as desired.