Waldorf Salad

palatablepastime

8 years ago

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Classic Autumn apple salad with raisins, nuts and honey.

Waldorf Salad

By Sue Lau | Palatable Pastime

This month for #ImprovCookingChallenge, a group of bloggers posting on unique topics that change each month, the theme celebrates Autumn with the combination of apples and honey. I happened to have this recipe for Waldorf salad which uses apples and honey in my files, so decided it would be a perfect time to share it.

The Waldorf salad is actually a historic one, dating back to the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, made by the chef at the Waldorf Hotel in New York City. The first version did not contain nuts, but like many a popular recipe, it evolved to have those as well as other ingredients over time, including things like chicken and dried fruits or raisins. These later versions may have contributed to the variety of chicken and turkey salad recipes in recent years which also use raisins or fresh grapes among other things.

Over the past few decades, I have seen Waldorf salad bump into other fruit salads as well, including those that are similar to Ambrosia salad. So as fruit salads with apples go, it has been a great starting point for many ideas to propound our food culture with fruit salads in general. Older salads that used more gelatin are now less popular as they have fallen out of vogue on the food scene.

Today, many fruit salads often contain cooked grains such a quinoa and kamut along with other nuts and seeds as part of a clean eating regime, but the classic retro Waldorf salad remains eternally popular, especially in apple harvest season through Thanksgiving.

Join me later this week when I post with #SoupSwappers on Saturday with my recipe for lamb and vegetable soup made in the Instant Pot on the pressure cooker setting. I have been having a lot of fun using the Instant Pot, and if you are looking for new recipe ideas to use with it, this one will be perfect for you.