Chicken salad casserole redux, or making a recipe your own

 

Chicken casserole recipes are so numerous that recently on the web I found one called Chicken Casserole No. 1000. This one, however, is probably my favorite. I’ve made it several times and probably shared it in this column, so I’m not sure why it struck me this week that the proportions in the original were all wrong. I suspect I fiddled with it without recording my changes. But Tuesday, my former colleague Melinda was coming for lunch, and I wanted something light—dare I say It? Ladylike. Tea room food. This fit the bill perfectly. But when I got into making it, it threatened to turn out all wrong. So I made the recipe my own.

According to the U. S. copyright law, ingredients to a recipe cannot be copyrighted—how do you have exclusive use of “one cup flour”? —but directions can. So when I find a recipe I want to share, I’m always sure to rewrite the directions. Frequently, my version makes more sense (at least to me). But I also often make a recipe my own by changing ingredients and amounts. That’s what happened with this.

I have no idea where I got this recipe. It’s typewritten with no attribution, so if I’m criticizing someone I know, I apologize. The recipe calls for using a 9x13 casserole dish  and layering two cups diced chicken and three sliced hard-boiled eggs in the dish. You can use your imagination—that much chicken and egg spread out in that big dish is sparse, at best. Then I was to add a whopping amount of sauce—two cups minced celery (that is a whole heck of a lot of celery), two cans cream of mushroom soup, ¾ cup mayonnaise, and ½ Tbsp. lemon juice. Not only did that sound like enough sauce for three chickens, it underplayed the ingredient that gives this dish its distinctive flavor—the lemon juice. The final outrage: two teaspoons of salt, in a day when we’re told to watch our sodium intake.

Obviously, the sauce is out of proportion to the amount of main ingredients, and to my mind some of the sauce’s ingredients needed balancing. Here’s what I did:

2 cups chicken, chopped (from a rotisserie chicken, if you want convenience)

3 hard-boiled eggs, sliced

1 can cream of mushroom soup

½ cup mayonnaise

¼ cup sour cream

1 cup minced celery

1 Tbsp. lemon juice

2 green onions, sliced fine or minced

1 tsp. sal

½ tsp. pepper         

Crushed potato chips

Layer the chicken and sliced eggs in a square, two-quart casserole. Separately mix other ingredients (except chips) and pour over chicken and eggs. Top with crushed potato chips. Bake at 350^o for 20 minutes or until just heated through. Watch carefully that potato chips don’t burn.