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.