Why I’m wild about Waldorf salad

You don’t see Waldorf salad so much nowadays. It’s a simple dish: raw celery, apple, grapes and walnuts, tossed in a mayonnaise-based dressing. Although you might still find it packaged in the bigger supermarkets, it’s fallen off dinner tables and restaurant menus alike. We wrinkle our noses at the prospect of combining fresh fruit and mayonnaise: the combination always makes me mentally place the Waldorf salad in the 70s, alongside big platters of dressed salmon, covered in wafer-thin cucumber scales, and a host of other mayonnaise-coated, tricky-to-identify bowls purporting to be salads, possibly involving tinned mandarin oranges.

But it’s actually much older than it feels: it was invented in 1896 for a charity ball being held at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. Peculiarly, it wasn’t one of the chefs, but the maître d’ of the hotel, Oscar Tschirky, who came up with the dish. But then Tschirky has form for creating dishes which became household names: he is also credited by some as coming up with thousand island dressing and eggs benedict. The salad’s name feels like it should point towards the walnuts which now form an integral part of the dish, but of course it is simply the name of its birthplace, and walnuts weren’t even part of the salad until 1928.

Waldorf salad has been the butt of culinary jokes for over 40 years, and is even the subject (and title) of a Fawlty Towers episode. When a hotel guest power-orders a waldorf salad, which doesn’t feature on the establishment’s menu, Basil falters. He tries to hide his ignorance and fob the guest off by explaining that they’re fresh ‘out of Waldorfs’. Sadly for Basil, this doesn’t fly; nor does his attempt to sell the guests a ‘Ritz’ salad, made up of apples, grapefruit and potatoes, coated in mayo.