Notable Sandwiches #36: Chicken Salad

Simple thanks for a simple thing

Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the series in which I, alongside my editor David Swanson, trip merrily through the profoundly odd and ever-changing document that is Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches. This week: the classic chicken salad.

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I grew up in a big family with busy parents, and the thing about growing up in a tangle of siblings—a loud tangle of siblings, squalorous, passionate, high-achieving siblings—is that it’s always something of a struggle to differentiate yourself. I managed this by being surpassingly strange, and a bit theatrical, throughout childhood and adolescence; I was and remain furtive, unpredictable, and self-savaging, equally prone to attract parental attention by generating alarm as by attracting pride in my achievements. Because my parents are Jewish and my mother is a child of immigrants (Holocaust survivors, no less), much of the attention paid to said quivering mass of children came in the form of enriching activities: a great deal of hiking (source of my lifelong predilection for malingering, as well as an enduring fear of heights), a plethora after-school activities to be driven to and picked up from, trips to museums, at least two separate science-themed summer camps, et cetera, ad nauseam.

All of this I recall with considerable awe—I can barely organize watering tomato plants, let alone coordinating multiple schedules tailored to the individual needs of smart and neurotic children while also working full-time—and no small degree of gratitude. My family largely eschewed television, not out of any religious fundamentalism, but because my parents were fanatical about enriching our minds; we were allowed to watch television on Saturday nights (when “Xena: Warrior Princess” was on) and sometimes on Sundays (after a long and enriching hike, probably). By fourteen, I was reading Roth and Bellow, attempting to teach myself French, trying to take part in the school fad of crocheting yarmulkes for guys we had crushes on, and preparing for a full high school career of playing the male lead in school plays. It was all disgustingly wholesome and I didn’t even know it, cared for so very, very deeply by parents who wanted me to have, above all things, a phenomenally rich life of the mind. 

But the thing about all that enrichment, rich as it was (and often satisfying—I got to play the titular role in Moliere’s The Miser, all four hundred lines of it), is that an endless stream of things meant to better me tired me out sometimes, and made me wonder how good I would be in the first place, without the relentless betterment. (I am aware of how grossly class-specific this sort of complaint is, but I think I did feel that way at the time; at the least, I was perennially exhausted). My siblings, too, were deeply engaged in constructive activities, meant to instill discipline, sportsmanship, memetic skills, public speaking and persuasive argument, a working knowledge of the Hebrew language—all of us tumbling headlong over each other in an endless stream of learning and improvement. 

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But there was one thing I had that had nothing to do with making me better (or thinner or smarter or more religious or more likely to get into Harvard). It’s something I remember fondly because it was a simple thing, and it was just for me, because I liked it. And it was this: every week when the weather was below ninety degrees or so, my family had chicken soup for our Friday night Sabbath meal, and the family recipe called for a full chicken carcass simmered for hours under a thick floating canopy of sliced leeks and carrots and miscellaneous root vegetables like celeriac. And I truly loved that long-simmered chicken—so tender, so yielding, falling off the bone into threads of savor. 

Because I loved the chicken so much, and because there was usually too little soup left to merit saving the whole mass of it, part of the ritual of Friday night became standing in the kitchen, separating out the leftover chicken from the mass of carrot bits, bones, flaccid onion shards, et cetera; and then I or my mother or my father would mix that soft, pulled chicken with mayonnaise, and salt, and paprika, and put it in the fridge to cool. And on Saturdays, that was a treat just for me.

It is amazing how much time and money went into the various moving parts of my education, extracurricular and curricular alike, and I think of it with a kind of stunned and abashed feeling, and a sense of the yawning unbridgeable gulf of filial debt I owe. But when I think about that chicken salad—which was perfect, mostly dark meat, fulsome with mayo and generous with the salt, and which I would wedge into sweet challah rolls from Zomick’s and devour with the especial and warming knowledge that this was my favorite thing and was done for me—I don’t feel the same abstraction or the same guilt; just gratitude, simple thanks, for a simple thing. 

I have since become respectfully and even enthusiastically acquainted with many different varieties of chicken salad, most of which bear little resemblance to the kind harvested from the chicken-soup pot. Once I adjusted to the big square-cut chunks of chicken breast, swimming in mayo and sometimes adorned with weird stuff like grapes, I grew to love it, and my go-to diner order (at least, before 10PM—my strict mayonnaise-salad curfew) is a chicken-salad melt with a side of onion rings and a Diet Coke. 

Chicken salad is an old dish—it’s probably been around for two hundred years, or maybe more, particularly if you divorce mayonnaise (which was invented ca. 1756, in France) from your definition and accept cooked chicken dressed in oil or vinegar as part of a more expansive vision. I’ve had variations that were tangier, richer, and generally sexier than the version I grew up on. But food nostalgia is a cruel mistress, a creature of yearning. Nothing will ever be better for me than leftover chicken-soup chicken—tossed casually in mayo and some spices, probably with a stray bit of boiled carrot or even a tiny boiled bone in it, always on lush rich golden challah—and I will never be that neurotic, self-loathing, precocious, volatile kid again. Proust is the most emblematic of food nostalgists, but aging ‘90s kids are single-handedly sustaining the continued existence of the Dunkaroo, trying to snack our way ceaselessly back into the past.

My mother had me when she was three years younger than I am now, which I am thinking about particularly as I have a birthday coming up; I was born smack in the middle of that welter of siblings. To put it mildly, my life has diverged sharply from what was expected of me as an Orthodox Jewish girl, and I do not expect to have children of my own anytime soon, or perhaps ever. But you always learn love, for better or worse, at your parents’ table, and following their example. (The time my father decided we all had to memorize and practice speeches at the Shabbat table in order to improve our public-speaking skills, while he ominously counted the number of times we said “like,” “um,” and “you know” on his fingers, was a memorable few months). 

When I consider what love is, and how I can give it to the people in my life, I think I could do worse than this: not just making sure the kids are fed their big warm golden bowls of soup; not just sending them into the Sabbath singing the ancient songs; not just making sure they’re bathed and pajama-ed and ready for bed; but taking the time, after, and during the washing-up of the towering stacks of plates and bowls and forks and spoons and knives, to sift through the leftovers, and find the tender flesh, sieving it out and dressing it anew for the delectation and joy of a child, and for no other reason. Love, for me, is that extra few minutes given despite exhaustion; it tastes like paprika, like soft-poached chicken thigh, like salt, a thing to savor.