Green, sugary goodness that memories are made of

As I pull the mixing blade from the bowl, a white peak covers the top like the final upward swirl of a soft-serve ice cream cone. The mixture of heavy cream, sugar, and dash of vanilla is whipped to perfection. My husband suggested this modification to my mother’s recipe, and he was right. Cool Whip pales in comparison to homemade.

The thing I remember most about childhood holiday dinners isn’t the pumpkin pie or the leftover turkey sandwiches we ate later in the evening or anything else you might expect. What has stayed with me over the years is an odd, fluffy green “salad” with a mysterious name.

Watergate salad. It’s not a salad at all, but my family ate it with our dinner, and my mother and I scooped more of the green goodness alongside our pumpkin pie.

I tear open a packet of instant pistachio pudding mix and watch the powder spill like a waterfall into the bowl. The mixing blade transforms the snowy white landscape of whipped cream into a mint-green wonderland. The cats come running when they hear the tab pop on a can of crushed pineapple and scatter when greeted by the spray bottle.

Peeling back the lid, I inhale the fruit’s sweet tropical smell and for a moment, I’m back in Mexico where my husband and I vacationed last year. Four years after my mother’s unexpected death.

To say my mom could be difficult is an understatement, especially during my childhood when her undiagnosed mental illness was at its worst. But we survived it, our relationship growing stronger as the years went by, and I expected to have many more years to make up for the problems of the past.

I shake my head and come back to the kitchen, dumping the pineapple, nectar and all, into the bowl. Stirring, dashes of yellow peek through the green fluff like Christmas lights strung through winter’s bare branches. I remember the fit my mother threw one year when the Christmas tree shed a particularly dense trail of needles as my father and brother dragged it inside.

A bag of chopped pecans crinkles like tinsel when I remove the rubber band holding it closed, attracting the cats once again. Another squirt of the spray bottle before adding the nuts and miniature marshmallows to the bowl. A few turns of the spatula complete the concoction, and I slide it onto the refrigerator shelf to chill.

Growing up with Watergate salad at holiday dinners made me think it was something everyone ate. But as an adult, when I showed up at potlucks and revealed my fluffy green concoction, people were amazed. They didn’t want to like it after I told them the ingredients.

Once considered a “fun food” with its space-agey instant gelatin (developed at the turn of the century) and exotic instant pistachio pudding (introduced by Jell-O in the mid-’70s), Watergate salad’s status plummeted thanks to modern-day concerns over sugar and fats. Susan Benjamin, a sugar and sweets historian, says it’s now considered a “lower-class food,” a dish those with more refined tastes and close attention to diet would snub their noses at.

After my friends tried it, though, they couldn’t get enough, not of the green goop on their spoon nor of speculation as to where it got its name. We conjured theories of its origins but were never certain.

Since no one in Oklahoma seemed to know of Watergate salad, I thought it was a Midwestern thing, my mother bringing the recipe with her when my family moved from Iowa to Oklahoma before I was born. But I’m the one who pre-dates Watergate salad by a few years.

The recipe, known officially as Pineapple Pistachio Delight and more affectionately as Pistachio Fluff, Green Fluff, and Green Goop, was printed in newspapers across the country after its creation in 1976 (or 1975 depending on the source). The name change is believed, at least by the recipe’s creator Kraft Kitchens, to have emerged from a Chicago food editor as a snazzier, attention-grabbing name given the Watergate scandal was still a hot topic of conversation.

Others believe the name came from the recipe’s predecessor, Watergate cake, an oddly green-tinted cake with pistachio pudding and a heaping pile of pecans mixed in with the batter and frosting. As to where the cake got its name, theories abound.

Some believe the name came from the sheer amount of nuts in the cake, reflecting the “nuts” in D.C. at the time of Watergate, or that the cake, like the salad, had a cover-up. The whipped cream in the salad hides most of the ingredients. As far as a connection to the Watergate hotel, which has been proposed, there is no evidence of the cake or the salad ever gracing the plates of hotel guests.

I envision my mother finding the recipe in the newspaper or maybe printed on the side of a box of instant pistachio pudding. Her mouth waters as she imagines what it tastes like, a dish to satisfy her sweet tooth during holiday dinners. And in that moment, a tradition was born.

I insist on making Watergate salad every Thanksgiving and Christmas. It’s something good and sweet that I enjoyed as a child. A connection to happier moments with my mother, watching her reach for the green fluff before anything else on her plate. Watching my child self do the same.

For me, Watergate salad is more than a dish from a bygone era. It’s a memory I will always hold on to. A ritual I will always honor.

© 2019 Krista Schumacher

Recipe for Watergate Salad — 
Whipped cream (9 oz. Cool Whip or make your own*)
1 (3.4-ounce) box instant pistachio pudding
1 (20-ounce) can crushed pineapple, undrained
1 cup miniature marshmallows
½ cup chopped pecans or walnuts

Mix pudding into whipped cream. Add remaining ingredients.
Chill before serving. *I use 1 pint of heavy cream.

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Originally published in Indelible Ink on Medium on December 18, 2019.