I came across a recipe called Lemon Slaw in one of my favorite cookbooks on southern cooking, “Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes and Honest Fried Chicken” by Ronni Lundy, a chronicler on not only Appalachian cookery but regional cooking of the Mountain south as well as a wide swatch of cooking from Georgia to the Kentucky, where she resides. Her other books, which I use all the time are “Butter Beans to Blackberries,” a gem of a book that has the finest recipe for peach cobbler you’ll ever have (I’ve adapted it here in past posts) and “Victuals” her definitive tome on Appalachian cooking.
It’s an old family recipe from Lundy’s mother, who made it on special occasions. I’ve adapted the recipe with very few changes and have made it twice so far, it’s so good.
Lemon slaw in its serving dish
Essentially, it’s a gelatin salad, which is not made with Jell-O but uses unflavored gelatin flavored with lemon juice and sugar. Yes you can call it retro–it reeks of 1950s American cooking, and you wouldn’t be wrong in thinking it should be prepared in a ring mold. I think that would make it fancier than it’s intended.
