3 hours ago, CatIsHungry said:Maybe the sour cream / whipping cream / cream cheese thing is regional???
It's one of the "classic" Jell-O strawberry molded salads in a Jell-O booklet that was featured and given away with the Tupperware gelatin molds - in the '60s. Made with sweetened frozen strawberries, bananas, crushed pineapple, walnuts, cream cheese, sour cream and topped with whipped cream. Later it was modified by omitting the bananas, subbing drained crushed pineapple and/or mandarin oranges (when the canned product became available in most supermarkets). I read that the original recipe was a Jell-O contest winner in the late 1950s that was sponsored by Jell-O in conjunction with Bird's Eye which had just introduced sweetened frozen strawberries in a box so the product was like a brick..
I lived next door to a regional Tupperware distributor who held "intro" parties for her sales people and I catered many of her parties. Besides paying me, she gave me a lot of Tupperware, including some of the items only for the hostesses. I had several of the molds in both sizes and a stack of the Jell-O booklets that featured that "salad" that could double as a dessert because it was quite sweet.
Later people made all kinds of changes to the basic recipe.