When I first looked at the table of contents in Food Network star Molly Yeh’s new cookbook Sweet Farm!, I was pleased, but not surprised, to see that the first chapter featured recipes for cookies and the second chapter for bars. But Chapter 3 stumped me. The title was simply “Salads”. Was Yeh trying to give us healthy food to balance out all of the sweets in the book?

Nope. The salads in Sweet Farm!, including the Classic Cookie Salad, are far from savory and rooted in Yeh’s home turf, the Upper Midwest. Clearly I had a lot to learn about these regional specialties, and luckily I was able to call on Yeh herself to explain them to me.

What Is a Sweet Salad?

Typically made from some combination of fruit, candy, cookies, pudding, Jell-O, and whipped cream, Yeh explained that sweet salads are a specialty of the Upper Midwest (think Minnesota and North Dakota) and frequently brought to potlucks, picnics, and church suppers. And while that combination of ingredients might sound pretty dessert-y to the uninitiated (aka, me), these dishes are typically grouped with a spread’s savory items, not the sweets.

Of course, the Upper Midwest doesn’t have a monopoly on sweet salads. Strawberry Pretzel Salad likely originated in Pennsylvania and is especially popular in the South. Marshmallow and Jell-O salads often grace Midwestern holiday tables. But those feel like lightweights—almost like actual salads!—compared to the cookie and candy-laden confections we’re talking about here.

Learning to Love Sweet Salads

For some of us, the “salad” descriptor might be a stretch. Yeh says she too was a skeptic when she moved to Minnesota and began seeing these dishes at parties and potlucks. “I grew up in Chicago, and the closest we ever came was a Jell-O mold that my mom’s friend would bring during the holidays. We never saw cookie salad or a Snickers salad. I was like, what the F is this?” 

After repeated exposure, Yeh says that something clicked in her brain. “I realized all of these components by themselves are delicious. Fresh whipped cream is delicious. Obviously cookies are delicious. Fruit pudding, especially when it’s from scratch, that’s delicious. Let’s try putting them together!” Now Yeh counts cookie salads and other sweet salads as her favorite type of Upper Midwestern cuisine.

They’re also excellent to make ahead, simple to customize, and easy to transport. Plus, sweet salads are frequently family recipes. “They are the absolute best catalysts for talking about your older family member who passed this recipe on to you,” Yeh writes in Sweet Farm! 

How to Make Cookie Salad

Yeh includes the recipe for Classic Cookie Salad in Sweet Farm! It features instant vanilla pudding, buttermilk, Cool Whip, Keebler Fudge Stripe cookies, a can of mandarin oranges, optional crushed pineapple, mini marshmallows, and bananas. The method is simple: make the pudding according to package directions with buttermilk instead of milk. Then fold in the Cool Whip, some crushed cookies, and most of the mandarin oranges. Top it with more oranges and whole cookies, and ta-da, you have a Cookie Salad!

Of course, since Yeh is a baking queen she also includes a recipe for Overachiever’s Cookie Salad, which gives directions for homemade cookies and pudding. And she encourages readers to swap in different types of cookies based on what you might have hanging around. “Cookie salads open the door to so much creativity and can help prevent food waste. Day old cookies that are a little dry are perfect for soaking up the pudding and whipped cream mixture.” Think of cookie salad as a way to give new life to stale baked goods, “like the French toast to your day-old cookie.”

Other Types of Sweet Salads

In addition to cookie salad, Yeh breaks sweet salads down into a few different categories.

• The Jell-O Salad: Maybe the most famous type of sweet salad nationally. Yeh notes that technically gelatin-based desserts like panna cotta should fall into this category.
• The Candy Bar Salad: Pudding + Cool Whip + chopped Snickers bars + Granny Smith apples. OK!
• Fluff: Yeh says these are made from “pudding, whipped cream, and other stuff.” She’s got a fun Ube Fluff recipe in Sweet Farm! (see above).

And, of course, there are salads made from fruit and whipped cream, that somehow seem more salad-y to me, I guess because they’re mostly fruit? 

In the end, I’m still not quite sure why these sweet desserts are called salads, but who am I to quibble? A dessert by any other name would still taste as sweet, or something like that. Yeh calls them “the quirkiest, most endearing genre of foods of all time,” and that’s good enough for me.