Why ambrosia salad is the forgotten holiday dish that deserves our attention (2024)

If you’re lucky enough to have tasted ambrosia salad, you’ll know that it’s only a “salad” in the loosest sense of the word.

The dish features a daring combination of jet-puffed marshmallows, shredded coconut, pineapple and mandarin oranges. It’s most commonly finished with a smattering of cool whip or sour cream and chilled in the fridge overnight, encouraging the ingredients to congeal into a dense, syrupy mass. More gourmet renditions have been known to include homemade marshmallows, crushed pecans, maraschino cherries and other fresh fruit. But beyond the various recipes, each ambrosia salad offers the same feeling: The quiet thrill of knowing you’re about to do something you shouldn’t, followed by pure, sticky bliss as you place that first goopy spoonful into your mouth.

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A fruit salad without morals, nothing about ambrosia indicates that it should be served as a main course. Nevertheless, this is where it’s most likely to appear. I have never seen ambrosia on a dessert table. But have bared witness to it resting amongst mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts and stuffing at countless Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners.

Cranberry sauce is the only comparably sweet holiday entrée-type food. But unlike ambrosia salad, the tart red sauce has a clear function at the dinner table. It enlivens gamey turkey thighs with acidity, while also injecting moisture into even the driest pieces of overcooked meat. It’s not immediately clear what ambrosia salad contributes to the harmony of a holiday meal. So how did it get here, and why?

The mixture of refrigerated coconut and sour cream is rumoured to have begun in the southern U.S. in the 1800s, with the earliest written reference of the salad published in a cookbook from 1867, Dixie Cookery by Maria Massey Barringer. Thanks to newly built railroads that linked the west coast with the east, imported ingredients like coconut became easier to access. By the 1870s, the proliferation of imported ingredients meant ambrosia recipes were as common asacaibowl recipes today.

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It may be difficult to imagine, but experiencing a bowl of ambrosia in the 19th century was likely akin to trying an acai bowl for the first time. The once hard-to-find ingredients were considered luxurious and exotic. The salad was a treat reserved for holidays and other special occasions, and named “ambrosia” after the food of the Greek and Roman gods.

But it wasn’t until the early 20th century that ambrosia as we know it came to be. A marketing campaign by Stephen F. Whitman & Son of Philadelphia encouraged home cooks to include marshmallow whip in ambrosia salad. By the late 1920s, whole marshmallows were introduced, creating the fluffy ambrosia salad that many of us recognize today.

But despite its longstanding culinary history, pictures tagged with #ambrosiasalad on Instagram turn up a mere 2,700 results. Compare this to the millions of pictures tagged with #foodp*rn #foodie or even #acaibowl (a hashtag so popular it has been granted its own curated video playlist) — and the winner is clear. The once trendy recipe has been demoted to an afterthought, if it hasn’t been forgotten almost entirely.

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It’s easy to see why the modern foodie might turn his or her nose up at the recipe. In a food culture that treats processed foods like co*ckroaches to exterminate, the marshmallow and cool whip concoction hardly fits in. And yet, we shouldn’t be so quick to throw ambrosia away.

The dish is the black sheep of Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner tables, but its very presence is a reminder that anything is possible if you set your mind to it, even a promiscuous serving of marshmallows and cool whip co-mingling with mashed potatoes and gravy on your plate.

It’s also undeniably delicious. Loaded with juicy morsels of pineapple and mandarin, the salad strikes a perfect balance between creamy and refreshing. The coconut, meanwhile, provides a satisfying crunchy texture, elevating the entire experience like a graham cracker completing a s’more.

The innovative use of commercial ingredients is reminiscent of pastry chef Christina Tosi’s famous Momof*cku Milk Bar empire. Just as Tosi repurposed Corn Flakes to create her iconic cereal milk ice cream, ambrosia reinvents marshmallows to bold new flavour heights. If gourmands dining at Momof*cku were presented with ambrosia salad, they would no doubt praise the confection for its inventive use of nostalgia-inducing childhood foods.

Context is everything when it comes to cooking and eating. So go ahead, make that bowl of ambrosia this holiday season and serve it to your guests. Allow the pastel mosaic of marshmallows to sit beside plates of roast turkey and honey ham. And don’t let anyone turn their nose up to a classic dish that’s spent decades earning its place at the dinner table.

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