This article is adapted from the February 22, 2025, edition of Gastro Obscura’s Favorite Things newsletter. You can sign up here.
In 2014, around Thanksgiving, talk-show host Ellen Degeneres showed her audience a photo of a mid-century American dish. “There’s something called a ‘Candle Salad.’ This is real,” she said, while the studio audience howled with laughter. “It is made with banana and pineapple … and mistakes. I tried it once. It was not my thing.”
For the uninitiated, this “salad”—I’m using the term loosely here—would look right at home at a bachelorette party spread. It consists of a lone banana held upright with either a pineapple base or a ring of Jell-O. There’s a maraschino cherry on top, along with a dribble of whipped cream or mayonnaise down the side. If you use your imagination, it could be said to resemble a candle—but I bet that’s not where your brain went first.
Degeneres isn’t the only one to take a shot at this NSFW side dish. In 2012, Amy Sedaris made the dish for Jimmy Fallon, prompting Vulture to quip, “It’s probably the only arts and crafts project on TV to ever run the risk of being blurred out by the network censors.”
More recently, Dylan Hollis, who recreates vintage recipes on TikTok, made a 1959 version declaring, “No man this Valentine’s Day? No problem!”
Given that Candle Salad now lives in the pop cultural lexicon exclusively as a punchline, I naively assumed that was always its role. Surely, if this were served at a Mad Men-era dinner party, it came with a sly wink on the side. But it turns out I couldn’t be more wrong.
Fun for the Whole Family
Incredibly, this creation, which first appeared in print in 1916 and became popular during the 1920s, was not a bachelorette party gag, but rather a popular Christmas and Halloween “treat” for children. A 1957 edition of Betty Crocker declared that “It’s better than a real candle, because you can eat it.”
“Only relatively contemporary writers such as myself refer to it as a phallic thing,” says Elizabeth Aldrich, author of Casseroles, Can Openers, and Jell-O: American Food and the Cold War. “This was never mentioned in the ’50s. The salad itself was a very popular recipe in children’s cookbooks. And nobody mentions what I think is pretty obvious.”
According to Aldrich, there was a pragmatic reason why this snack showed up in kid’s cookbooks. “It was a very simple recipe. Children didn’t have to worry about using a knife or burning their hands on the stove,” she says. Maybe children in the 1950s possessed the Herculean restraint to avoid saying the quiet part out loud.
Since the inventor of the recipe remains unknown, we can only speculate why—beyond ease of preparation—anyone thought Candle Salad was a good idea. “It was part of a movement of food as illusion, or food that is made to look like something else, which you see actually at the beginning of the end of the 19th century,” Aldrich says. She likens it to the recent TikTok trend in which creators whip up cakes that look like anything but cake.
Paw through midcentury cookbooks on entertaining and you’ll find a mousse of salmon made with skimmed milk, mayonnaise, and canned fish molded into the shape of a salmon; a school of tropical fish appearing to swim through Jell-O in an “aspic aquarium”; and, most distressing of all, a “pineapple” sculpted entirely of liverwurst.
“It was just a big mound of liverwurst with cut pimento olives to look like the eyes,” Aldrich says. “And then, ironically, you could put [on] the top of a real pineapple to make it look more like a pineapple.”
Simply put, Candle Salad emerged during a period when American food got really weird, really fast. Starting in the 1920s, recipes abounded with mayonnaise, Cool Whip, lime green Jell-O, and every iteration of condensed soup.
Most of these recipes were born out of the corporate test kitchens of Betty Crocker, General Mills, Campbell’s, and other large food companies. One has to wonder if the talented women scientists were genuinely enthusiastic about leering gelatin faces, or if they were just trolling the American public.
The Pineapple King
Although the inventor of Candle Salad has been lost to history, it’s almost certain that corporate interests had a hand in making it popular. If you look closely, recipes involving canned pineapple were suddenly everywhere by the 1920s, thanks to one man nicknamed the “Pineapple King.”
In 1901, James Drummond Dole poured everything he had into creating the Hawaiian Pineapple Company. Business was rocky for the first few years, particularly after the Panic of 1907, a stock market crash also known as the Knickerbocker Crisis. In 1922, Dole doubled down, purchasing the entire island of Lanai in order to grow even more pineapples.
There was just one problem: up until then, there hadn’t been a big demand for pineapples among American consumers, so what eventually became the Dole Food Company had to create one from scratch. They flooded print magazines with glossy ads for canned pineapple products, along with multiple public recipe contests. Before long, pineapple upside-down cake, one of the winners in 1926, was everywhere.
In the process, the Dole Food Company also peddled a stylized image of Polynesian culture. “By the 1950s, we see [pamphlets], some of them even published by the Dole Company, on how to throw a suburban luau, and all of these recipes for phony Hawaiian food,” Aldrich says.
A Holiday Special
Candle Salad managed to hang around in the American zeitgeist for decades. In the 1960s, some recipes even tried to rebrand it as “Rocket Salad,” in keeping with the Space Race fervor.
Some recipes swap the pineapple base for a festive red star Jell-O mold or mandarin orange slices. Seemingly, it could be served at any time of year, although it was particularly popular around the Christmas holidays.
“The old Christmas Candle Salad has been so popular for so many generations that at this time of year it is as much entitled to appear in print once more as is the story of Santa and his famous reindeer,” enthused a recipe published on December 20, 1928, in the Philadelphia Tribune. “A mound of red jelly at the base of the candle and a suitable thick dressing (flavored whipped cream is delicious) poured over the banana at the last minute to represent the flowing wax—and the never-dying Christmas candle salad is again ready for the Christmas meal.”
Since Candle Salad’s appeal these days seems hard to fathom, my colleagues and I figured that the only way to really understand what was going on there was to make it. For journalism.
Although some early recipes place a decorative almond at the banana tip, we opted for the more common Red-40 maraschino cherry—an American invention created and popularized in 1925. Since banana and mayonnaise are thought to pair well together (at least according to much of the American South, where banana and mayo sandwiches remain a niche favorite) we opted for a decorative squirt of Hellman’s. If you’re going for visual drama, however, whipped cream clings better to the banana.
The one logistical hurdle we ran into was that the banana struggled to stay upright. One wan slice of canned pineapple was a fairly flimsy base, no matter how many toothpicks we wedged in to buttress our sagging central fruit.
After some trial and error, we learned that stacking several canned pineapple rings together (you may need to carve a larger hole in the middle) or, even better, abandoning canned in favor of a fresh pineapple base, made for a more structurally sound salad.
Were the results good? Of course not. Taste was never really the point. But if you’re looking for a conversation piece for your next midcentury potluck, this one is guaranteed to get some attention. Just maybe leave the kids out of it.
Candle Salad
- Prep time: 15 minutes
- Total time: 15 minutes
- 2 servings
Ingredients
- 1 firm banana
- 1 maraschino cherry
- 1 fresh pineapple
- 1 head of butter lettuce
- Mayonnaise or whipped cream, to taste
- Toothpicks, as needed
Instructions
- Peel the pineapple and cut off a round slice at least four inches high. Core the slice, making sure the hole is roughly the circumference of the banana. Peel your banana and cut the lower tip off.
- Arrange lettuce leaves around a serving platter. Place your pineapple in the center, then insert your banana into the hole.
- Use a toothpick to attach the maraschino cherry to the top of the banana. Place whipped cream or mayonnaise on the side. Ask yourself once again, “What were they thinking?” and serve.
Notes and Tips
If preparing Candle Salad for a holiday crowd, simply double, triple, or quadruple your upright bananas and serve them side-by-side on the same bed of lettuce.
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