You won’t find any apple in Delia Smith’s Waldorf salad. Instead she tosses strips of cooked chicken with crunchy celery, spring onion and walnut in a garlic and tarragon mayonnaise. Then pile it on crisp lettuce, scatter over halved black grapes, and you have a chicken salad that makes a 20-minute main course for 4.
Leaving out the apple surprises anyone who knows the original Waldorf, but the grapes and celery give it the same sweet crunch. Her Chicken Collection (2003) puts it in the autumn chapter, and she suggests the new season’s wet walnuts if you can find them, which are in the shops from about September.
The dressing goes on before the grapes, so the fruit stays bright and whole on top instead of being mixed through. You get tender chicken in a creamy, garlicky coating, crunchy celery and walnuts, a little aniseed warmth from the tarragon and sweet bursts of grape.
Delia Smith’s Chicken Waldorf Salad
Course: SaladsCuisine: BritishDifficulty: Easy4
servings20
minutes450
kcalFrom The Delia Collection: Chicken (2003), page 93, a main-course Waldorf with grapes and tarragon instead of apple. These ingredients serve 4 on a bed of lettuce.
Ingredients
- For the salad:
1kg (2lb 4oz) cooked chicken
4 sticks celery (110g / 4oz), chopped
8 spring onions, chopped, green parts included
50g (2oz) walnut halves, roughly chopped
175g (6oz) seedless black grapes, halved
a few lettuce leaves
sprigs of watercress, to garnish
- For the dressing:
1 teaspoon sea salt
2 cloves garlic
2 teaspoons chopped fresh tarragon
2 rounded tablespoons mayonnaise
2 heaped dessertspoons natural yoghurt
freshly ground black pepper
Directions
- Chicken: Strip off the chicken skin and throw it away. Take the meat off the bones, slice it into longish pieces about 2.5cm (1in) thick and put them in a large bowl.
- Crunch: Add the celery, spring onions and walnuts to the chicken.
- Dressing: Crush the sea salt fairly coarsely in a pestle and mortar, then add the garlic and crush it until it turns to a purée with the salt. Stir in the tarragon, mayonnaise and yoghurt with a few twists of pepper and blend well.
- Toss: Pour the dressing over the chicken and toss until everything is well coated.
- Serve: Arrange the lettuce leaves in a large, shallow serving dish and pile the chicken salad on top.
- Finish: Scatter the grapes all over and add a few sprigs of watercress.
Notes
- Leftover roast chicken works just as well as a bought cooked chicken, as long as it's skinned and cut into longish pieces.
- Ready-made mayonnaise is fine here, as the garlic and tarragon carry most of the flavour.
- Cooked chicken needs to stay cold: keep the dressed salad covered in the fridge and finish it within 2 days, by my own reckoning.
FAQs
Where is the apple?
There isn’t any, as Delia leaves it out of her Waldorf. The crunch comes from the celery and walnuts, and the sweet, juicy part from black grapes scattered over at the end.
If you’d like apple anyway, a crisp red apple, cored and diced with the skin on and stirred in with the celery, is my own addition. Keep the grapes as well, so it stays her salad.
What are wet walnuts?
New-season walnuts, sold before they’ve been dried. Delia recommends them for this salad if you can get hold of them, which is why it sits in the autumn chapter of her Chicken Collection.
They have a softer, milkier bite than ordinary dried walnut halves, and you’ll need to crack and peel them yourself. Out of season, ordinary walnut halves are fine, roughly chopped.
Can I use dried tarragon?
You can, though the leafy kind tastes better. Her Chicken Collection asks for 2 teaspoons of chopped tarragon leaves, while her earlier One is Fun version allows dried, pounded with the salt and garlic into a paste.
Dried tarragon is much stronger, so I’d use about a third of the amount, which is my own rule of thumb. Bunches of tarragon are in most supermarket herb sections from spring to autumn, and the rest of a bunch suits her chicken with sherry vinegar and tarragon.
Can I make it for one?
Of course, since it first appeared in One is Fun, written for cooking for one. That version uses a 200g (7oz) cooked chicken joint, 1 stick of celery, 2 spring onions, 10g (½oz) of walnuts and 8 black grapes.
The dressing is ⅓ teaspoon of rock salt, half a clove of garlic, ½ teaspoon of tarragon, 1 rounded tablespoon of mayonnaise and 1 heaped dessertspoon of yoghurt. Delia suggests a cooked chicken leg portion from the supermarket as just the right size.
Does Delia make other chicken salads?
Yes, two more in the same book. Her chicken salad with tarragon and grapes, which goes back to the Complete Cookery Course, uses green grapes and a dressing of mayonnaise with double cream, and she rates it one of the nicest salads for a summer day.
Her curried chicken salad, for 6, mixes the chicken with Madras curry paste, mango chutney, raisins, dried apricots and toasted almonds. She suggests it for using up leftover chicken or for a buffet.
