When I was a child, every field trip, picnic, or adventure also meant a perfectly constructed chicken salad sandwich, made on white bread and cut into two triangles, placed inside a large Ziploc bag with regular Lay’s potato chips. Edges left intact.
Not necessarily the healthiest lunch, but it was my favorite, and a recipe passed down to me by mom from her mom, carrying generations of stories and memories with it.
While chicken salad traces its official origins back to China in early 200 B.C.E, the more modern, mayonnaise-based version’s roots go back to early European recipes in the nineteenth century, before showing up in various American cookbooks in the early to mid 1840s.
Then, in Wakefield, Rhode Island, in 1863, the staple Southern dish would become even more popular in America when Liam Gray’s recipe put chicken salad on the map commercially, becoming a huge hit, and ultimately seeing Gray turn his shop into a delicatessen.
Almost two hundred years later, a homespun, family recipe for chicken salad was handed down to me by my mom from her mother. The recipe was simple, and meant to be a more affordable lunch while still being hearty and filling.
I’ve made a few changes since I started making it in college, but the original recipe involves using two cans of Swanson’s white meat only canned chicken. That’s right, canned chicken. It’s cheaper and easier and works to feed hungry kids, and I’m certain that’s why it was chosen over cooked and shredded chicken breasts, which I would later use in my recipe. More to come on that later.
Once you drain the chicken, you add it to a large bowl with red grapes, which are sweeter, cut in half, alongside Kraft Mayo, hard-boiled eggs with the yolk removed, and occasionally celery to add a little crunch to the salad. Seasoned liberally with salt and pepper, it’s all mixed and then put in the fridge for at least a day to get chilled and let the flavor build. Lightly sprinkled with paprika, it was served on two white pieces of bread.
While at the University of Georgia, I honed the recipe and made it my own, substituting canned chicken for a rotisserie chicken or freshly cooked breasts, shredded and put in the fridge for an hour to cool down. Below is the official recipe for my homespun chicken salad, a perfect cold sandwich for these hot summer days. The recipe serves roughly three to four people.
- Two chicken breasts or the white meat from a Rotisserie chicken breast, shredded.
- 6 hard-boiled eggs, yolks removed and sliced into fourths.
- 1 teaspoon of Dijon or Brown Mustard
- ⅔ cup of Duke’s Mayo
- 1 finely chopped stalk of celery
- Two dashes of paprika
- Liberally season with Salt and Pepper
- Red grapes, cut in half, roughly 20-25 grapes.
Add all these ingredients to a large bowl and mix with a spoon, seasoning to taste. Sprinkle with paprika and cover with aluminum foil before putting the chicken salad in the fridge to chill for a full day. Enjoy on white bread with the optional classic Lay’s potato chips.
Occasionally, at my grandparents’ old house on Claremont Street in East Ridge, they would add garden-fresh lettuce and tomatoes, making it that much more tasty.
These sandwiches wedged their way deeply into my heart early on, and the chicken salad sandwich carries more than just nostalgia for me; it carries a lifetime of memories and moments shared with my family. It brings me back to my childhood, and I think all of us need that from time to time.