The Real Reason It's Called Watergate Salad
It's now been more than five decades since the infamous Watergate scandal rocked American politics and led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. One of its strangest legacies may be a dish almost as unusual as the scandal itself: the Watergate Salad. However, the reason the salad shares its name with the infamous crime is quite murky.
Travel back to 1972, and you could enjoy a cool bowl of Watergate Salad, a blend of pistachio pudding, Southern staples canned pineapple and chopped pecans, marshmallows, and whipped cream. The term "salad" is used quite generously here, but back then the idea of cold, sweet salads had been widely adopted after a successful marketing campaign by Jell-O, which touted them as a modern convenience. The dish previously went by a number of more objectively accurate names, including "Pistachio Delight," "Green Fluff," and "Green Goop," as well as more evocative titles like "Shut the Gate salad", and "Funeral salad."
The dish first emerged in the early 1900s, decades before the Watergate Hotel was built. It was brought on by the development of instant gelatin, which allowed people to easily make marshmallows and gelatin molds. This led to a trend in fluffy, marshmallow-based dessert salads, such as the Watergate salad and the closely related Ambrosia Salad. They remained fashionable into the second half of the century but, interestingly enough, there was never any evidence that the Watergate Hotel itself sold one. So why were those original names supplanted? Why is it called Watergate salad?
Watergate salad was never sold at the hotel
The first explanation for the pistachio pudding mixture being rechristened as "Watergate" may just be a simple mistake. In 1976, the Denver Post published a recipe which claimed the Watergate Salad was developed by a sous chef at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, and the name took off after the scandal. However, the hotel staff itself say there is no record of a chef there creating it, and there are articles predating that one which call it Watergate Salad but without the mistaken explanation from the Post. That means the mistake can't actually be the origin of the name.
This also discounts Jell-O itself as the salad's origin. Kraft, the owners of Jell-O, say the recipe printed on the package was called Pistachio Pineapple Delight until 1993, long after the alternative name had taken off. Kraft also wasn't the source of the original recipe. Despite once claiming that the company first developed pistachio pineapple delight itself when it released its pistachio pudding mix, said mix wasn't released until 1975, post-dating other mentions of Watergate Salad by several years.
The actual origins of the Watergate Salad dish even under other names are hard to pin down. All the way back in 1925, Helen Keller actually published a recipe in a cookbook called "Golden Gate salad" that has very similar ingredients but lacks pistachio pudding. However, pistachio pudding mixes existed before the Jell-O version, and recipes like Watergate Salad existed by the early 1970s, before Kraft's recipe.
Watergate Salad may have been named after a cake
The last theory seems to be the most likely because the timing fits. The salad most likely gets its name from Watergate Cake, which is made from similar ingredients and uses pistachio pudding for icing. But that begs the same question in a different way: Where did Watergate Cake get its name? Once again, evidence suggests that the Watergate Hotel never served this dessert, and the exact origin of the name is still subject to debate.
The most popular theory points to an article published in a Hagerstown, Maryland newspaper in September 1974 (per Mental Floss), one month after Nixon resigned. It explains that the Watergate name is a piece of satirical wordplay, based on the fact that the cake had a "cover-up" in the form of its thick frosting and that, much like Washington D.C., the cake was full of nuts. The dish quickly caught on because the word "Watergate" was already on everybody's tongues in the mid-1970s.
Having a similar covered nut mixture, the Watergate name was likely transferred from the cake to its salad cousin, or potentially vice-versa. Nobody can pin down exactly when or where this transition occurred, but the 1973-'74 timeline makes the wordplay theory the most convincing, since it was just a renaming of an existing recipe. For a time, both dishes rode the disgraced president's coattails to nationwide popularity, but today, you are unlikely to find the Watergate Salad on any menu.