The sweetest Potluck secret of the middle west

Take your first Midwest Potluck and you may be surprised at how it is stored on the table on the table. Of course they will recognize cords. You can also spy on a fruit salad that mixes fresh and fruit together in doses. The chances are high. There will be at least a shaky-shaped Jell-O dish that is not filled with fruit, but with curiosities such as pretzels or vegetables. But what about the pudding-based cookie thing? It sits with the salads, not with the desserts. And wait what? It’s called “Kekssalat”?

Welcome to the middle west.

What is Cookie salad?

A million miles from the production course, the salads of the middle west are generally made of cool whips, vanilla pudding, buttermilk, canned goods (often mandarin oranges) and fudge stripe cookies (like this Sold by everyone’s favorite biscuit). And don’t even ask: who struggles up a cookie salad not A dessert. You will also collide the fact that this salad is mainly made from shelving stability ingredients. In contrast to something that was built from salad and other vegetables, this salad is essentially always ready, be it for a last-minute invitation or a track-of-moment-hosting requirement. And how many traditional salads can say that?

It is difficult to set right there In the Dakotas and Minnesota–Via Church -Kochbuchs, while they appear in many pots, in school cafeterias and even in the prepared food department Grocery. The cookie salad is documented to travel to Montana where A writer remembers that it had Potlucks in the Lutheran Church.

Paul Fehribach, the native of Indiana, cook/owner of the Chicago restaurant Big Jones and author of the 2023 cookbook Midwestern Food: A cookie guide on the surprising story of a large American cuisinePresent I didn’t add a biscuit salad to his first book, but says that a recipe for volume two is on the short list. “After that, people started mentioning biscuit salads Midwestern food came out, but I had never heard of them before ” has researched. “I would suspect that all of their origins are 70s or 80s,” he says.

Perhaps the cookie salad was the invention of a marketing professional with Keebler, the long -term biscuit of the court. A representative of the company rejected an original loan, but said that Keebler was glad that her cookies still “bring people together in an entertaining and creative way”.

As a cookie salad nation

The biscuit salad may have made its biggest leap from the middle west Cook book author and the food network personality Molly Yeh-Who had grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, but had never tried a biscuit salad with Nick Hagen from Minnesota and moved to his Sugar Beet Farm on the border between Minnesota-North Dakota.

But they taste it and Yeh fell in love with the court. She even put a version in the salad area of the Menu at BernieThe restaurant, which she opened with Nick in East Grand Forks in 2022.

“I think it’s great that it is delicious, a super quirky talk starter,” she says. “Every family biscuit salad has a story. It is also a great way to consume day-old cookies because it brings them a new life. Cookie salad is cookies, which is French toast to make bread.”

The court was presented in Yehs 2025 cookbook, Sweet farm!Nod with an east coast. Instead of fudge stripes, Yeh New York’s traditional works Black and white biscuit In the leading role. It uses a no-bake cheesecake filling instead of traditional pudding, a substitution that describes it as “fluffy and lively, with a perfect balance of sweetness”.

It is not just Yeh who spread the biscuit salad love, especially online. In 2021 Ree Drummond A shared versionand later in the year, TikTok’s Thisid Western Mama Whipped you up while he explained the process in her trademark, an exaggerated accent in the middle west.

It is not difficult to imagine that home chefs, especially those from the Midwest, give their own turns. Allrecipes players have added Twix and other candy poles as well as fresh fruit such as red grapes, cut bananas and strawberries. An allrecipes -actor took a note from Ree Drummond and included a package coconut -Instant -pudding and the vanilla for additional taste.

It is nostalgic, endlessly jelly and apologetically cute. Just don’t call it a dessert.