Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of desserts and not of men.
Today in 1972, authorities caught and arrested a group of men trying to break into an office in Washington, DC’s Watergate Hotel – men who, we later learned, were connected to President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign.
Over the next two years, the scandal known as Watergate unfolded with reports about dirty tricks, secret White House tapes, indictments, impeachment hearings and eventually the president resigning from office.
And for whatever reason, there was also something called Watergate Salad.
Now, if I was trying to come up with a name for my new culinary creation, I’m not sure I’d name it after an event that President Gerald Ford called “our long national nightmare.”
But there was some historical precedent here.
Mental Floss reports that before the Watergate Hotel was built, there was another building in DC known as the Water Gate Inn, which served a “Water Gate Ice Box Cake” to guests.
And Watergate Salad is a sweet salad, centered around pistachio-flavored Jell-O.
This was, after all, the heyday of gelatin-based desserts nicknamed “salads.”
Most versions include pineapple as well as marshmallows or Cool Whip.
We don’t know who exactly gave the salad its scandalous name, though it’s sometimes credited to an unnamed newspaper editor in Chicago.
More than a few people said at the time that with a recipe full of nuts, the name fit.
For some people, Watergate salad has lingered in the imagination longer than Watergate the national crisis.
In the 1990s, Kraft started publishing a version of the Watergate salad recipe on the boxes of its pistachio-flavored Jell-O, though they opted for a less discreditable name: Pistachio Pineapple Delight.
If you want to learn about Watergate, there are lots of museums.
The Nixon Presidential Library in California has a big exhibit, for example.
But in 2022, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington hosted an exhibit called “Watergate: Portraiture and Intrigue.”
It featured photographs, paintings, political cartoons and other artwork that could “bring visitors face-to-face with Watergate’s key players.”
For example, there was a Mount Rushmore parody sculpture featuring President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Jell-O Journalism: Investigating the Origins of Watergate Salad (Mental Floss)
Watergate: Portraiture and Intrigue (National Portrait Gallery)
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