Green Slime

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As a child, I remember my mother dreaming up the recipe for Green Slime, as my sister and I used to call it, a pineapple pistachio whipped dessert we had every year around the holidays and sometimes in the summer. It’s timeless and delicious, nutty and tropical, the perfect dessert for every season. Sure, she said the recipe was on the back of the Pistachio Pudding Jell-O box, but somehow in my head it was still my mom’s recipe. Maybe she had invented it and written a letter to General Mills, and they had been so impressed with the recipe that they had put it on the back of the Jell-O box. I thought the world of my mom (still do). It seemed possible. Recently I learned that Green Slime is not a family recipe at all–not my family’s recipe–it’s a national treasure. More below…

Recipe

Cocktail Ingredients (makes 1 cocktail)

1 box (3.4 oz) Jell-O Pistachio Pudding
8 oz Cool Whip
1 can crushed pineapple in juice (20 oz)
Garnish: crushed pistachios, candied pineapple

Cocktail Instructions

Dump it all in a bowl, stir
Refrigerate for an hour

Notes & Tips

For a more fun mixing experience, first mix pineapple and pistachio pudding mix together— it makes a WILD green color—then mix in the cool whip

Green Slime Origin Story

The controversial dessert, Green Slime, that inspired the delicious cocktail, Pineapple Pistachio Perfection.

Intense internet sleuthing revealed that General Mills printed a similar recipe on the back of the Pistachio Pudding Jell-O box in 1975. Not my mom’s recipe. Pistachio Pineapple Delight called for my mom’s ingredients (crushed pineapple, pistachio pudding mix, and whipped cream), plus walnuts and marshmallows (gag!). Definitely not my mom’s recipe.

Rumor is a Chicago food editor renamed the dessert Watergate Salad but neither editor nor article have ever been tracked down. Satirically named recipes were all the rage in the 70s. Another theory is that the salad was invented by the sous-chef at the Watergate Hotel, although first accounts of similar recipes allegedly date back to the 1910s.

The Watergate Salad made something of a comeback in 1997 when it was featured in “Anne & Nan” a syndicated household advice column. Like a green zombie that refuses to die, it’s back again in 2024, now a “retro dessert,” appearing in TikTok videos, food blogs, and IG feeds. All of the recipes say the same thing: “5 ingredients, 5 minutes.” No. That is NOT how you make Green Slime.

I had to get to the bottom of this. Where did MY family’s version of this recipe come from? I called my mom but she didn’t pick up so I sent her a text message explaining all that I had discovered on the internet and asked where she originally found the recipe. She called me back a few minutes later, laughed at me, and proceeded to tell me the recipe, twice. Then without pausing for my response, she concluded “You don’t put walnuts or marshmallows in it. That’s gross.” and, realizing that she’d finally paused long enough for me to get a word in, I whipped back “Thank you! But WHERE DID THE RECIPE COME FROM, MOM?”

Her response was simple: “Betty Ketterer used to make it.” Another pause. “Oh,” I said back. “Who the hell is Betty Ketterer?” Without skipping a beat and in a tone that implied I should have known who Mrs. Ketterer was, my mom replied “She lived in the house next door when I was growing up.” And there it was, an origination story with a time and a place, and Betty Ketterer. It would have been the mid-70s when Mrs. Ketterer started making Pineapple Pistachio Delight, probably from the recipe on the back of the Jell-O box. I can only assume that Betty, or someone close to her, didn’t care for walnuts and wasn’t a fan of marshmallows.

It was the late 80s when my sister and I not-so-cleverly renamed the dessert to “Green Slime,” undoubtedly influenced by Nickelodeon’s green slime, which first debuted in 1981 in an episode of “You Can’t Do That on Television.”

I can’t get onboard with adding walnuts and marshmallows (gag!) to this timeless classic and the only name I’ve ever known for this dessert is Green Slime. It’s not a great name for something that’s meant to be ingested, but then again neither is Watergate Salad.