Cranberry Jelly Salad With Lime-Sugared Nuts Recipe (2024)

My Kansan ex-MIL had a Jello concoction every night at dinner. Orange Jello substituted for a fruit, green for a vegetable.I worked in a cafeteria when I was 16 and they made a delicious Lime Jello salad that had cream cheese or sour cream, nuts and pineapple. Maybe marshmallows.

This has been a Thanksgiving staple since my mother clipped the recipe from the 1969 Ames Tribune.1 (6 oz.) pkg. raspberry Jello1 c. boiling water1 (1 lb. 4 oz.) can crushed pineapple, undrained1 (1 lb.) can whole cranberry sauce3/4 c. port or red wine1 c. pecans, chopped8 oz. cream cheese, softened1 c. sour creamDissolve Jello in water. Stir in cranberry sauce, pineapple, wine, and pecans. Pour into a slightly oiled large Tupperware mold and top with blended sour/cream cheese when set.

Google "grated cucumber, cream cheese and lime jello" and you'll find a host of recipes.

When I was a young bride back in the '60s, one of my favorite cookbooks was called The Joys of Jello. I decorated my kitchen with those copper-colored metal molds.

My mother used to make one like this however she added celery for the crunch and used sliced almonds instead of walnuts. I saw this and the memories were so happy, Especially when she would forget to serve it until we started to put things away in the refrigerator.

For the holidays my family always has cranberry jello salad similar to this recipe. It has chopped cranberries, celery, mandarin oranges, water chestnuts and crushed pineapple. Always a hit.

Fill a big bowl with hot water and submerge the mold up to the jello line for a few seconds to loosen the jello. If it doesn't plop out on the first try, do it again. Tupperware needs a few more seconds in the hot water than metal. I've never tried a ceramic mold with jello. Pop the un-molded jello back in the fridge for a while to firm back up.

What a great throwback.My mother made a lime jello "salad" with suspended chopped celery, apples and walnuts for Thanksgiving. (Not a hit)For my mom's annual holiday party, a family friend always brought a strawberry jello mold with crushed pineapple, banana, and sliced strawberries with a sour cream layer (this one we actually looked forward to). It's family lore that the guest intentionally omitted an ingredient when asked for the recipe (because no one could ever replicate her dish).

I don't care much for most jello salads but my mom (in the 1950s) made one I loved. On holidays she combined canned pitted cherries with some of their juice and sweet kosher wine instead of water with walnuts and a dark cherry jello.

I’d like to know what mold was used in the photo. I have an old Pyrex glass brioche mold that would look great. Is that what was used?

For many years I’ve made a similar dish for Christmas Eve - my recipe uses raspberry jello, fresh cranberries, lemon juice, chopped celery, and pecans. Jell-O salad may be considered kitschy or camp, but this is a family favorite. Three cheers for Jell-O!!!

Am making for the first time. Did anyone save the cooked cranberry and apple solids and use? I do like whole berry cranberry sauce so am thinking to use that way. Or put into an apple crisp with a few other apples. thoughts

My mother made one with lime jello and grated carrots, minced scallions, green pepper, cottage cheese and heavy cream. She loved it but her daughters did not!! I do have her recipe if you would like it!!

Our family tradition been is a lemon jello with cool whip infused stripe for at least 40 years. It is served with the meal, and adds a delightful brightness to the turkey, stuffing, and cranberries made from scratch. It started sometime in the 70’s, and every year my mom says- don’t you think it’s time to drop the jello? And every year my brother and I insist that it remains on the menu.

We enjoyed this at Thanksgiving yesterday. The one change I would make for next time is to coarsely chop the late addition cranberries and possibly cook them a tiny bit with some sugar. Overall this was a refreshing addition to our Thanksgiving repertoire.

What size mold?

Ha ha ha. Make the jello salad. In addition, use the cooked cranberries and apples that don't appear in the final product as your holiday cranberry sauce. Then they won't go to waste. :-)

I found the taste of this gelled dish very good, but the consistency too rubbery. This was the first time I'd made a jelly. Further research indicate a ration of .25 ounce (1 packet) of powdered gelatin per single cup of liquid. Following that rule, this recipe specifies twice as much gelatin as necessary. Perhaps the chemicals in the fruits used effected the set, and the gelatin capacity was adjusted to take account of this. I will try this again with adjusted proportions.

Raw cranberries in the gelatin looks pretty but tastes horrid. (And I like unsweetened cranberry juice!) it would be better to cook all the cranberries instead of only 1 1/2 cups of cranberries, then reserve 1/2 of cooked cranberries to add to the gelatin with the raw chopped apple. The citric acid in the lime sugar topping shouldn’t be optional; it tastes flat without it.

I was excited to find a jello mold recipe that used fruit juice and gelatin, and for the most part, I really liked the recipe--it was not too sweet, and the fruit flavors came through beautifully, with nice crunch from the fruit & nuts. However, 1/2 tsp. citric acid was WAY too much for the topping; in the future, if I used the citric acid at all, I'd add it to taste, starting with a small pinch and working up from there.

This was just okay for the amount of work (and the amount of dishes to wash). It was less sweet than I had expected/hoped for. I followed the recipe except that I put in chopped oranges instead of chopped apples. I would not make this again.

The whole raw cranberries are way too bitter. It looked beautiful but really did not taste good at all. The jelly/jello was not terribly interesting either. We like sour foods but somehow those uncooked cranberries need to be sweetened a lot more to make the salad palatable for us. We love the limed sugar and want to find another way to use it - and the dish looked lovely. But we're glad we experimented with this before serving it to our family.

The cranberries within the mold are uncooked, and not enough sweetness in remainder of mold to compensate for their tartness. Also, odd to have no suggestions for use of discarded cooked cranberry and apple solids. I tried recooking the mixture into a more standard cranberry sauce. An improvement, but not as good as simple cranberry/water/sugar recipe.

Um, this is weird. I trusted nyt cooking and put it on out Thanksgiving table, but obviously the whole cranberries taste terrible in here. Come on, Eric Kim, did you really try it before you not only put the recipe online but published it in the magazine just before thanksgiving? There’s got to be a better cranberry jelly recipe.

Flavors were great. The lime sugar was unexpected. However the recipe calls for whole fresh cranberries in the finished product which are inedible.

I probably won't make this again, it's not worth the trouble of toasting nuts, chopping apples, and zesting limes. I would definitely leave out the 1/2 cup uncooked cranberries at the end; they were an unpleasant surprise to encounter when eating.

Made this for thanksgiving and my family loved it. Personally, I found the 1/2 cup of fresh cranberries a wonderful addition--I used homemade cranberry juice, but I can imagine that the tart pops of cranberry would be even more welcome if using store-bought cranberry juice, which is quite sweet. Overall, I would increase the gelatin and liquid to 1.5x of what is called (there is a LOT of mix-ins to the jelly and I found the ratio a little off), but otherwise, this is a keeper!

We loved this and it looked beautiful. Great break from the richness of the meal. However, I did double the sugar in the gelatin and was very happy I did. It balanced the tart of the raw cranberries.

We enjoyed this at Thanksgiving yesterday. The one change I would make for next time is to coarsely chop the late addition cranberries and possibly cook them a tiny bit with some sugar. Overall this was a refreshing addition to our Thanksgiving repertoire.

Coming back to say, this was really good. I think the Times edited the recipe at some point this month? You're basically cooking down a lot of fruit in juice to get a lot of flavor to mix with gelatin and then tossing that fruit. Then you put some uncooked fruit in the mold. But I didn't add fresh cranberries at the end. I dug through my cooked fruit for berries that had kept some integrity. I also peeled the 1/2 cup apples at the end, soaking them in lime juice first.