The other day a friend in Texas was telling me about all the Hatch chile items she’d bought at the store on a recent visit. Besides whole roasted chile peppers, she also picked up salsa, tortillas, cobbler, and chips. But the thing she gushed about the most was a limited-edition Hatch chile chicken salad. “We ate the whole container in one sitting,” she said.
Chicken salad is something that I enjoy, especially when it's hot outside, but I’ve never felt compelled to eat a whole quart at one time. My interest piqued, I asked my friend what made the chicken salad so special. She explained that it was your basic chicken salad but it had been livened up with green chiles and corn. Those two ingredients took it to another realm, as the peppers added some heat and the corn gave the salad a sweet crunch.
Now when you think of Texan cuisine, I will admit that chicken salad isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. Yet there are written records of it being served as far back as the 1850s and there are no less than six recipes for chicken salad in The First Texas Cookbook published in 1883. While perhaps it’s not considered an iconic Texan dish today, it is still very much a part of the state’s culinary history.
The chicken salads I grew up eating were usually made with chicken, pecans, and grapes, combined with either an herbed or a curried mayonnaise. Both are very good and perhaps I’ll discuss them further at another time. (Then there is my great-grandma Blanche's version with lemon gelatin, which I will probably not discuss at another time.) But the chicken salad my friend described with green chiles was new to me, and since I was curious if it was as wonderful as she said, I decided to make my own version at home.
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