Getting to Know Cooking With 7 Up
Mid-century cooking tends to conjure up images of gelatinous salads, casseroles, and banana overuse , but have you heard the good news about fizzy cooking? It turns out that sodas, especially 7 Up, actually have a wide variety of culinary uses besides drinking, and we’re going to explore three of the most popular recipes.
Welcome to Retro Week , where we light up the flux condenser and introduce you to the 1950s know-how of everything from making casseroles to building fallout shelters to joys for kids to relax and play with trash.
Like all good dishes, we’ll start with the salad.
Salad 7 Up
I will never forget the first time I took my then boyfriend and now ex-husband to visit my family in Mississippi, a place where the remains of mid-century cooking are still a stronghold. We were at the buffet – apparently after church – when a very bewildered man asked me “why is there a bunch of whipped cream next to the salad.”
“Oh,” I replied, “it’s kind of like a salad.” After thirty seconds of arguing over the definitions of salad and dessert, I reminded my boyfriend that there were people behind him and I really wanted to get to the real dessert before they ran out of banana pudding.
The poor thing had never seen a frozen salad before and flatly refused to taste it. I’m not a huge Jell-O fan so I don’t eat tons of them, but I really love my grandma’s 7 Up salad, which has cream cheese (it reduces shiver) and shredded pineapple and pecans (two of my favorites). I’m not sure where she originally got the recipe, but she has since published it on her own in her iconic cookbook, Recipes from Granny’s Gemstone.
To make it you will need:
- 1 cup boiling water
- 1 pack of lime jelly
- 1 pack of 8 ounce cream cheese
- 1 small can of minced pineapple
- 1/2 cup chopped pecans
- 1 teaspoon sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- A few drops of green food coloring
- 7 oz 7 Up
Dissolve Jell-O in boiling water and place in a piece of cream cheese. It will look like this:
Your reaction will be something like “this can’t be,” but don’t worry, you are doing everything right. Combine cream cheese and gelatin juice until you have a nice smooth bowl. Add all other ingredients except baking soda and stir. Carefully add the 7 Up and mix gently to dissolve. Pour it (gracefully) into some retro shape. (I tried to find a classic fish mold at Goodwill, but it didn’t.)
Place the mold in the refrigerator and let cool overnight until the mixture is completely solid. Turn it out on a plate and watch for inevitable cosmetic damage.
Laugh to yourself nervously and mumble “it’s okay” over and over as you try to hide your failure with cherries.
As far as the green salads go, it’s definitely pretty stiff, but I love the creamy consistency and citrus flavor that is accentuated by juicy pineapple chunks and crunchy pecans. Moving on.
Cookies 7 Up
Do you like cookies that taste like they came from Popeye’s Airport? Because I love, and that’s what those fat little mounds of glory taste like. You can find 7 Up cookie recipe all over the internet, but the proportions are almost always the same. To make them you will need:
- 4 cups Bisquik (or other baking mix)
- 1 glass of sour cream
- 1 cup 7 Up
- 1/2 cup butter
Preheat oven to 45o ℉ and place a baking dish with butter in it to melt as the oven heats up. (Watch it, though, and take it out when it melts.) Combine the baking mixture and sour cream with a fork until you have a shaggy mess, then slowly pour in the baking soda. Stir until you have a viscous albeit very sticky dough.
Place the dough on a surface thoroughly covered with the baking mixture, then brush your hands with the baking mixture. Then strip naked (optional) and cover your entire body with baking mixture because it’s not sticky. Knead the dough until it is no longer incredibly sticky, then knead it to about an inch thick.
Using a cookie cutter (or wine glass or empty soup can), cut out some of the cookies. Place the raw biscuits in a sea of melted butter and bake for 12-15 minutes, until pretty and lightly browned.
These cookies are delicious. I mean, of course, they are; they are literally cooked in a puddle of butter. However, they are also quite heavy, because – again – the whole situation is with the “puddle of oil”. This means you don’t have to do the painstaking work of oiling them, but it also means you can’t eat more than one. As I mentioned earlier, they taste like instant cookies and I don’t consider that an insult.
Cake 7 Up
This fragrant citrus cake of trickery betrayed me not once, but twice. It chilled me a bit the first time, as I was able to turn bad luck into a tasty parfait and more importantly, contentment .
In fact, the problem might not be the cake (or the recipe from All Recipes ), but my wacky Bundt frying pan, which seems to have stopped doing its job correctly. The second time I tried to make this supposedly light dessert, I greased it with Crisco butter, then lightly sprinkled it with flour, and still.
Anyway. If you have a better Bundt frying pan and want to try your hand at this popular dessert icon, you will need:
- 3 cups white sugar
- 1 1/2 cups butter, softened
- 5 eggs
- 3 cups sifted flour
- 2 tablespoons lemon extract
- 1 cup 7 Up
Grease the skillet very well and sprinkle with flour. Pray to all the gods you believe in and cross yourself for good measure. Preheat oven to 325 ℉. Whisk the sugar and butter until smooth. Add eggs one at a time, stirring well after each egg. Add flour one cup at a time, stirring again thoroughly after each addition. Stir in the extract and then carefully add the baking soda as it sizzles and splashes. Pour the dough into your ready but not cooked enough, pan, insert it into the oven, and bake until a toothpick is inserted in the middle (cake, not pan) comes out clean.
Even if your cake doesn’t come off the pan in a pleasant way, know that it’s still delicious, and if I baked it in a regular pan, I’m sure I would appreciate the overall experience. After all, it’s still a cake, and even an ugly cake is good, especially when covered with a frosting consisting of 1 cup sifted powdered sugar, 1/4 cup milk, and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla. …
Overall I would say that it is a culinary journey from the past went well, but I do not know, fall whether any of these recipes in my repertoire. In fact, this is a blatant lie. I’ve already eaten three of these cookies, and there are no papayas within walking distance, so I’ll probably make more of them.