Love Letter to Chicken Salad

Chicken salad is both retro and timeless. Its fluid transitions from season to season and laid-back way of accommodating whatever you have in the refrigerator make it a natural for any cook’s repertoire. Better yet, chicken salad clicks perfectly with today’s sensibilities of healthful eating, stretching your dollar and reducing food waste.

That bit of roasted chicken left from last night’s dinner? Too good to waste, the leftovers are perfect for lunch’s chicken salad. Keep the carcass for homemade chicken stock, along with the tips and tails of the veggies you put in the salad. (Collect all the stock pieces and store in an airtight container in the freezer until you’re ready to use.)

Repurposing chicken into a salad dates back to 1863, according to food history lore. The owner of Town Meats in Wakefield, Rhode Island, mixed leftover chicken with mayo, tarragon and grapes to customers’ delight. (Likely thrifty cooks were making a variation for their families long before Liam Gray, the meat shop’s owner.)

I started thinking about chicken salad as a date stamp of culinary history. How has it changed—or not—since 1863? The chicken salad of my youth, and maybe yours too, was an amalgam of chunky chicken, mayo and celery. Adding halved grapes and pecans elevated it to gourmet status.

Within the yellowed pages of my 1951 copy of The Joy of Cooking, by Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker, were six variations of chicken salad—with bean sprouts, cucumber and English walnuts; with parboiled oysters; even with seedless grapes and fresh pineapple. I think we can all agree on skipping the Chicken Salad in Aspic recipe.

In 1994, curried chicken salad came into vogue with In the Kitchen with Rosie: Oprah’s Favorite Recipes by Rosie Daley, Oprah’s cook, who’s credited with helping her lose weight. Ten years later, O, the Oprah Magazine ran a recipe for Margaux’s Curried Chicken Sandwich, dubbed “Oprah’s favorite sandwich in America!”

Just as we tell our kids that they can grow up to be anything they want, so it is with chicken salad. It’s classic, like the version Grandma made, and it’s a creative fusion of a cook’s ideas.

Chef Theresa Koenig gives us chicken salad three ways, pushing it in flavorful new directions (recipes at left). Serve them with crackers, as sandwiches, incorporated into an antipasti board, or served in lettuce cups or over salad greens. Or skip the accompaniments altogether and serve them by themselves.

C’mon, give them a try. Don’t be chicken.