Chicken salad sandwiches: adventures in mayonnaise

I’m from the South. There can be debates about whether or not the northern part of Virginia currently constitutes the South, but when I was growing up there in the 70s and 80s, it definitely did. It helps that my family is not from the area now known as “NoVA” but from an area west of there, which is starting to finally get built up now but was a tiny community in which everyone knew each other when I was a kid. I have an Italian last name due to my father, but I grew up pretty much entirely surrounded by my mother’s side of the family, who are major old-school white people. Well-off ones, too–total “mint juleps on the veranda” types. My deceased maternal grandfather had an accent almost exactly like Foghorn Leghorn’s.

I bring all of this up by way of explaining that chicken salad was a regular fixture of lunchtime meals during my childhood. It went along with a lot of other Southern white favorites, like deviled eggs and tuna fish–all that mayonnaise-laden glop that I associate with my mom and my grandmother making finger sandwiches for church luncheons and garden club socials and shit. As I have previously mentioned, I hate mayonnaise. With a fiery burning passion, in fact. Therefore, when chicken salad sandwiches came up on The List for this month, I felt very ambivalent. Certainly, as a lifelong resident of Virginia, I should be easily able to come up with and review a chicken salad sandwich. However, I was expectting some seriously gross eating times while doing so. Not exactly a mouth-watering prospect.

The chicken salad of my youth (stock photo)

I’m not even sure I ever tasted chicken salad as a child. In my memory, I tried and hated it, but I’m not sure that ever actually happened. I could be mixing it up with any of a number of other mayonnaise-based dishes  that my mother and/or grandmother would prepare and serve to me, which I would choke down with the exaggerated grimace of a prepubescent child. There are several obvious red flags that let me know I would have hated it as a kid, though. Not just mayonnaise, but onions, celery, and that particular childhood aversion to foods touching each other (which Jim also mentioned in his excellent investigation into chicken salad). I wasn’t down with any of that stuff, and I’m sure I took evasive action whenever I encountered chicken salad as a kid.

By the way, what’s up with “chicken salad” anyway? It’s something completely different from a salad with chicken in it–I enjoy those, as a rule, especially if they involve Caesar dressing. But why did the phrase “chicken salad” come to symbolize a particular congealed-mush foodstuff held together by mayonnaise? I’m sure, as with a lot of foods, it was originally just a way to use up a bunch of leftovers, but why was it added together in such an unappetizing fashion? Maybe my dad’s Yankee Italian genes just left me too un-Southern to understand.

If I was gonna go ahead and choke down a chicken salad sandwich for this post, though, I knew where the easiest and best place to get one was: the sandwich rack at 7-11. Despite my attempt to frame this place around the nauseating tradition of British Rail sandwiches, it’s actually got pretty good quality on the whole–certainly better than going to some of the local grocery stores that serve prepared sandwiches (those really are pretty gross sometimes–in hindsight, I should have hit up Food Lion for that post). I mean, you pay $4 for a sandwich that you could probably make 15 of if you just spent the same amount of money on ingredients, so it’s not the best economic investment, but still way cheaper than a Chipotle burrito, so what the hell.

And what do you know–it’s actually not bad! I can tell you right now, though, the main reason I didn’t mind this chicken salad sandwich is probably the exact reason my grandfather would have turned his nose up at it–hardly any mayonnaise. It’s as if the people who make these sandwiches for 7-11 actually care to an extent about the health factor of their sandwiches, and therefore make their chicken salad with a minimal amount of mayonnaise–just enough to hold the sandwich together. It’s the polar opposite of the way we used to make the tuna for subs back when I worked at Subway. For those still in the dark about exactly how gnarly that tuna mix they serve with an ice cream scoop exactly is, here’s the recipe for it: 2 industrial-sized cans of tuna, 2 giant bags of mayonnaise, dumped into a big ol’ mixing bowl and stirred together by hand (don’t worry, we wore gloves). 7-11 is apparently being a bit more circumspect about the amount of mayo they want to overload you with, and thank god for that.

I’m still not a huge fan of the onions and celery that also get plugged into the mix, so I’m also happy to report that 7-11 used a minimum of those. The sandwich I had seemed to consist almost entirely of chicken and wheat bread, coincidentally its only ingredients that I actually like, so I was into it. My tastes would probably disappoint my mother, who was always so dismayed when as a child I would demand that she not put mayonnaise on the meat sandwiches she’d send with me for middle school lunches, but then I’ve disappointed my mother in a whole lot of ways over the years. Why should this be any different?

Drew

I’m a transgender weirdo who loves music, books, comics, and all kinds of other geeky crap. I edit an arts/music/culture magazine in my hometown of Richmond VA (rvamag.com). But let’s not talk about my day job. Let’s talk about food. I love food.