What Is Amish Yum Yum Salad — And Is It Even A Salad?

Amish cuisine doesn't get much attention outside of its own community, likely due to their relative, though often over-exaggerated, detachment from the rest of American society. Spend any time with an Amish family though, and you will quickly discover that food is an incredibly important part of the culture. Mennonite life places great emphasis on the family unit, and daily meals are treated with more reverence than they are in most other corners of society. Dinner in an Amish household is a significant and regimented event. Multiple dishes are served, and there is almost always dessert. Some of these sweets will be familiar to outsiders, such as pudding, pie, and cake, but there's one popular choice that you probably haven't heard of: yum yum salad.

Salad for dessert? You bet. Although the image you have in your head right now is probably a far cry from what yum yum salad actually is. There is no lettuce or vegetable of any kind. Yum yum salad is a sweet, fruity dessert with orange jello as the key ingredient. The jello is mixed with some combination of whipped cream, cream cheese, or whipped topping, such as Cool Whip, to give it a uniquely smooth and fluffy texture. To this, one adds canned crushed pineapple and sometimes mandarin oranges, whipping it all together and refrigerating until the jello firms up. Now, a lot of you are probably thinking that's not a salad, but you'd actually be wrong about that.

The word salad doesn't refer to what you'd expect. It is not defined by lettuce or produce of any type. In fact, it isn't really defined by anything. Throughout history, salads have taken many forms, including a whole host built around jello. Gelatin-based dishes were huge in the 50s and 60s when industrialized food was an exciting novelty rather than the unhealthy force we often view it as today. Most Americans of that era wouldn't bat an eye at the Amish yum yum salad.

The mid-20th century saw a number of savory jello dishes that basically took a classical vegetable salad and encased it in jello. These became so popular that the Jell-O company actually released a number of veggie-flavored varieties, including celery, Italian salad, and seasoned tomato. However, dessert options similar to yum yum salad were also extremely popular, and some retain a strong fan following to this day.

What separates dessert salads from other jello salads is the addition of whipped cream or whipped topping. One of the most famous examples is the Watergate salad, which is made with Jell-O pistachio pudding, canned pineapple, and marshmallows. Another popular variety, sea foam salad, incorporates lime jello and canned pear. Most intriguing for our purposes is orange jello salad, which is nearly identical to Amish yum yum salad save for the curious addition of cottage cheese. You can find countless recipes for it online, but whether it's directly related to yum yum salad seems unclear.

Yum yum salad might challenge your expectations of what Amish food would be. After all, jello is very much a product of the modern industrialized food complex, which clashes with the view many outsiders have of the Amish as a group that eschews all aspects of modernity. Such perceptions are greatly over-exaggerated, for while the Amish are generally more reticent to adopt new technologies, they don't reject them all. Many use phones, power tools, and refrigerators, certainly helpful for setting jello. They tend to stay off the grid, generating their own power, but when you consider all these aspects, it's hardly surprising that they'd embrace the modern food industry. Amish culture does not enforce any dietary restrictions, and if you head through Pennsylvania Dutch territory, you might even see horse-drawn buggies at drive-thrus.

Amish cuisine currently sits at an interesting intersection between antiquity and modernity, and there are still aspects that outsiders might perceive as outdated. Their culinary culture is centered on longstanding gender roles, where wives and daughters are expected to handle the cooking. Since even everyday meals are a big affair, women often spend hours in the kitchen. With so much on their hands, you can see the appeal of a jello-based dessert, which is quick to assemble and involves mostly inactive time. Compared to the labor-intensive nature of a pie or cake, yum yum salad is surely a welcome addition to the Amish dessert repertoire.