The Scary Green Jello Salad
It was my Mom’s go-to church salad … and it had peas in it!
What can you say about things that scared you when you were a kid? Some children were afraid of clowns or closets or roller coasters, but I was afraid of Mom’s green Jello salad.
It wasn’t that I thought the green Jello salad would sneak up on me in the night, or anything like that. It was more just the sheer wrongness of Jello with peas in it.
Jello was meant to be sweet, to soothe you when you had your tonsils out, that kind of thing. It wasn’t supposed to be savory. It wasn’t supposed to have peas and celery in it and a weird, nasty white dressing on the top.
I haven’t found an exact match, but this one with mayonnaise mixed in sounds equally horrifying:
This one has a misleadingly friendly title, Holiday Salad, but it has peas and green peppers and onions in it. The way they say to let the ingredients “congeal” is simply sinister:
