Chicken salad is any salad with chicken as a main ingredient. Other common ingredients include mayonnaise, hard-boiled egg, celery, onion, pepper, pickles (or pickle relish) and a variety of mustards.
In Canada and the United States, "chicken salad" refers to either any salad with chicken, or a specific mixed salad consisting primarily of chopped chicken meat and a binder, such as mayonnaise, salad dressing or cream cheese.[1] Like tuna salad and egg salad, it may be served on top of lettuce, tomato, avocado, or some combination of these.[2] It may also be used for sandwiches. Typically it is made with leftover cooked or canned chicken. It may also be a garden salad with fried, grilled, or roasted chicken (usually cut up or diced) on top.
In Europe and Asia, the salad may be complemented by any number of dressings, or no dressing at all, and the salad constituents can vary from traditional leaves and vegetables, to pastas, couscous, noodles or rice.
An early chicken salad recipe from the book included cold roast chicken and a salad dressing made from mustard, sugar, oil,vinegar and cayenne.
Early American chicken salad recipes can be found in 19th-century Southern cookbooks, including Sarah Rutledge's The Carolina Housewife: Or, House and Home (1847) and Abby Fisher's What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking (1881). Rutledge details a recipe for "A Salad To Be Eaten With Cold Meat Or Fowl" that explains how to make a mayonnaise from scratch, before adding it to cold meats (chicken and seafood).[3]
Abby Fisher similarly describes making a homemade mayonnaise, before adding it to chicken and white celery.[4]
One of the first American forms of chicken salad was served by Town Meats in Wakefield, Rhode Island, in 1863. The original owner, Liam Gray,[5] mixed his leftover chicken with mayonnaise, tarragon, and grapes. This became such a popular item that the meat market was converted to a delicatessen.
Chicken salad is among the Fourth of July foods listed by The American System of Cookery (1847).[6] [7]