Grandma Stuns TikTok With Recipe Calling For Cottage Cheese, Jell-O, Pineapple & More—So I Tried It
Delish editors spend a lot of time scrolling through TikTok for the newest food trends. Sometimes we discover a recipe and add it to our rotation until the end of time (hello, baked feta pasta). Other food tricks are fun, but don’t have the longevity to become a household name.
And in the last category are recipes so ridiculous or vile that they probably should have never been invented in the first place. A recent video posted to TikTok clearly belongs in this category.
TikTok user @eczemmma and her grandma Sheila walk us through a step-by-step recipe for her infamous Jell-O salad. And every ingredient is worse than the last. Lime Jell-O. Mayo. Cottage Cheese. Pineapple. Olives. It’s not often that a recipe video leaves me feeling completely repulsed.
I wasn’t the only one grossed out by Sheila’s recipe. In the comments, one user wrote, “Y’all should see the face I’m making.” Another added, “My stomach just turned sour.”
Several other users noted that this resembles many of the retro Jell-O salads that dominated mid-century cookbooks. Grandma Sheila clarified in another video that she first discovered the recipe at a tea party in 1956, and she’s changed and adapted it over several decades.
The video racked up over five million views, which prompted @eczemmma to upload another video of her trying her grandma’s salad.
She described it as “not as bad as it looks.” In the original video, Grandma Sheila promises that we’re “going to love it.” But is this true? I decided to try her recipe to find out.
First I started by making the base of the salad. I made one batch of lime Jell-O, but followed Sheila’s instructions rather than the ones listed on the package. I added two tablespoons of mayonnaise and one tablespoon of apple cider vinegar before adding enough water to reach one and a half cups.
Once it began to “gel a little bit,” as grandma Sheila says, it was time to add the strange mix-ins. I first scooped in an entire tub of…
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