By New Year’s week. The apartment is quiet again. Mama flew back to Sapulpa on Monday morning — Cody picked her up at the curb outside our building at seven AM and drove her back — and Dustin’s parents drove back to Memphis on Sunday after Christmas. The three of us are alone in the apartment for the first time in nearly two weeks. Brayden is thirteen weeks old.
The frozen cherry salad is one of Dustin’s mother Carol’s recipes — a 1970s-era Bryant-family holiday salad made with canned cherry-pie filling, cream cheese, crushed pineapple, mini marshmallows, and whipped topping, frozen in a loaf pan and sliced like a brick. Carol had typed it up on the laptop during the Memphis visit two months ago and emailed me the file. I had been saving it for the right week. The week between Christmas and New Year’s is the right week.
The recipe is vintage in the technical sense — gelatin-adjacent, pre-Internet, the kind of recipe that lives in a church-cookbook three-ring binder under the heading “Salads, Frozen.” The texture is creamy-icy. The pineapple keeps it from being too sweet. The cherries make every slice look like a 1972 magazine illustration. Dustin had eaten it at every Bryant Christmas of his life until 2020 when we missed the Bryant Christmas for the courthouse wedding and the move to Tulsa. He has been quietly missing it for two years.
Sunday I made it. The salad sat in the freezer for six hours before slicing. Dustin had two slices at dinner and a third after Brayden went down for his evening sleep. He sat at the kitchen table holding the third slice on a small plate with a fork and said it tasted exactly like the kitchen on Honeysuckle Drive in Memphis at four-thirty on Christmas afternoon. He said this without any visible emotion, which with Dustin is the indicator that the emotion is real.
Frozen Cherry Salad
Prep Time: 20 minutes | Cook Time: 0 minutes | Total Time: 4 hours 20 minutes (includes freezing) | Servings: 12
Ingredients
- 1 package (8 oz) cream cheese, softened
- 1/3 cup granulated sugar
- 1 can (20 oz) crushed pineapple, well drained
- 1 can (21 oz) cherry pie filling
- 1 container (8 oz) frozen whipped topping, thawed
- 1/2 cup chopped pecans or walnuts (optional)
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Instructions
- Beat the base. In a large mixing bowl, beat the softened cream cheese and sugar together with a hand mixer until smooth and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Stir in the vanilla extract.
- Fold in the fruit. Add the well-drained crushed pineapple and the cherry pie filling to the cream cheese mixture. Stir gently to combine, being careful not to break down the cherries too much.
- Incorporate the topping. Fold in the thawed whipped topping using a rubber spatula until just combined and no streaks remain. Fold in the nuts if using.
- Transfer and freeze. Pour the mixture into a 9x13-inch baking dish or divide evenly into a standard 12-cup muffin tin lined with cupcake liners for individual portions. Smooth the top.
- Freeze until firm. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and freeze for at least 4 hours or overnight, until completely solid.
- Serve. Remove from the freezer 10–15 minutes before serving to allow slight softening. Slice into squares or pop individual portions from the muffin tin. Serve cold.
Nutrition (per serving)
Calories: 220 | Protein: 2g | Fat: 10g | Carbs: 31g | Fiber: 1g | Sodium: 90mg