I told my son to please make some chicken salad with the left over roasted chicken. He made a delicious salad with baby greens, celery, tomatoes, baby carrots, small sweet peppers, tomatoes and snap peas-- to which he added shredded chicken. It was yummy and I have no complaints-- except that wasn’t chicken salad. That’s salad with chicken in it. Chicken salad has mayo and hardly no greens. Maybe celery.
What say you all. Were my instructions not clear? Was what he made chicken salad?
Reported for wrong forum. Sorry.
Mmm. Lunchtime.
Off to CS.
It was a chicken salad, but it wasn’t chicken salad.
I say salad with chicken on it. Chicken salad, to me, is something you make a sandwich from.
It’s both. You were correct that the mayo dish is generally what is expected, but he’s also right that what he made is kind of like steak salad or chicken caesar salad.
ETA:
This!
The term is at least somewhat ambiguous. While there is certainly a specific dish known popularly as “chicken salad,” what your son made is not an incorrect interpretation.
Yes, it’s absolutely a form of chicken salad. It’s not the canonical American “chicken salad,” but it’s something that I would accept as “chicken salad” if I saw it on a menu with a description that included the above.
I had no idea there was this very specific recipe that Americans call ‘chicken salad’, to the exclusion of other salads which have chicken in, therefore I vote ‘that is chicken salad’.
Chicken salad is American. Learn something new every day.
The very general ideal is that something labeled “some sort of meat” salad will consist of said meat, chopped and mixed with mayo and maybe some vegetation and served either as a sandwich spread or in a mound amidst lettuce to be eaten as a “diet” plate.
I agree as well. He made “a” chicken salad, but he did not make chicken salad.
Well, chicken salad is served all around the world in myriad forms. The mayo & chicken thing is fairly specifically American (though I’d wager not exclusively, as Central/Eastern Europe also seems to have a lot of mayo and non-greens based salads in my experience.) Wikipedia has a good run-down. The American form originates from 1863 in Rhode Island.
This—except I would have said "It was a chicken salad, but it certainly wasn’t some chicken salad.
This again. I prefer a chicken salad to chicken salad.
There are only a few rules here (in 'murica).
Those rules hold not just for meat salads, but for potato and macaroni salads as well. You can’t just throw some boiled potatoes onto a bunch of veggies and call it potato salad, and you can’t throw chicken onto a bunch of veggies and call it chicken salad.
It sounds like a delicious meal, though.
It was a salad with chicken in it. I could concede it was ‘a’ chicken salad, but I don’t think that’s quite right. We may say ‘Caesar chicken salad’ or ‘Southwest BBQ chicken salad’, but that’s just shorthand for ‘a salad with chicken in it’.
‘Chicken salad’ is, as Johnny Bravo says, chicken mixed with a binder. The binder is mayonnaise or, occasionally, for some people, Miracle Whip. (Really, it has to be mayonnaise. Best Foods mayonnaise.) It may contain celery, minced onion, relish… even bacon bits. But the main ingredient is the chicken.
Or look at it this way: Suppose you made a niçoise salad. Would you call that ‘tuna salad’?
I concur. Chicken salad refers to a dish where chicken is the main ingredient. It needs qualifiers to refer to something else. A good example is how they are named in the fast food salads. It’s bacon ranch chicken salad or a fresh chicken salad or such (like in JLA’s post). They know that, if they just said “chicken salad,” people would think of the meat dish.
I do not agree it has to have may[o] in it, however. You can use pretty much any sauce. Miracle Whip is common, as is ranch dressing, sour cream, or french onion dip. Maybe even cottage cheese. And maybe there’s some not-white sauce that people use, too.
Anyways, I’d call what he made either a fresh chicken salad or a roasted chicken salad.
Denny’s Cranberry Apple Chicken Salad
McDonald’s Southwest Grilled Chicken Salad
Wendy’s Apple Pecan Chicken Salad
None of these seem to fit the apparently consensus definition of “chicken salad.”
scr4, that’s because you’re mis-parsing those. A “cranberry apple chicken salad” isn’t a [cranberry][apple][chicken salad], it’s a [cranberry apple chicken][salad].
Chicken salad is the stuff you spread on a sandwich.
All that said, though, what the OP’s son made was probably quite good.