I'm not sure if I ever brought this up before but I was bored once and spent a couple hours trying to dissect the Party Cheese Salad recipe. I know most people assume it's just an autistic 70s Jell-O recipe and it mostly is but the ingredient combination make those
tuna salad Jell-O molds look sane. With a lot of persistent searching, (I can't find it now and it was a very obscure website) I was able to find a recipe that actually had the same ingredients but used lime instead of lemon Jell-O and I remembered Jack saying you could use Lime or Lemon Jell-O. Lime "Jell-O Salad" is actually a pretty obscure southern dessert (also from around the time of the retro Jell-O recipes) that can be made a few different ways.
Some recipes usually use cottage cheese, mayo & evaporated milk in place of the cream cheese & cool whip which leads me to believe that the cool whip + cream cheese was a way to simplify and sweeten the recipe.
This recipe comes a little bit closer but omits the vegetables.
This recipe, adds celery to it which makes sense. It doesn't really put out a ton of flavor and is mostly there for the crunch. The first thing that makes this dish so vile is the pimentos. I could not find a single recipe that used diced pimentos. Even the one that matched Jack's didn't use pimentos. The last recipe called for
pistachios but not pimentos. I fully believe Aunt Myrna knew better and told him pimentos and all this other shit just to confuse and mock Jack. The bell pepper could have been a normal part of the recipe but the only time I could find
these recipes was a more traditional savory Jell-O mold style recipe from a 1980 Betty Crocker cookbook that used even worse ingredients like onions & vinegar. Also other than Velveeta Shreds (were these around at that time?) there's no such thing as shredded American cheese. The only thing I can think is Jack cut up strips from a Kraft single.
But the one thing that almost all of these recipes do that Jack and all of his haydurs did wrong? They drain the pineapple and then use the juice make the Jell-O separately first, let it cool a bit (but not set) and then fold in the cool whip and all the other ingredients. When you're basically boiling together all these ingredients and cooking all the vegetables down in pineapple, cream cheese and cool whip, I'm not shocked that you're getting that "bile" flavor.
Other than omitting the vegetables, Rob did great by also separating the cool whip from the remainder.