Tuna salad is deeply personal.
Ask any midwesterner for a tuna salad recipe and you’ll never get the same notes twice. While the ingredients may be fairly standard across each mix, tuna salad is a deeply personal recipe, passed down from midwestern moms to their reluctant (and recently mayonnaise-averse) daughters over generations of steel mixing bowls and aging Tupperware.
At its core, a tuna salad mix consists of flaked tuna and a seasoned dressing (mayonnaise is absolutely optional). You can’t have tuna salad without those two ingredients.
Last year, the recipe gained a bit of press and popularity, with some amplifying the “best” ingredients while others pushed texture. Regardless, the dish is always familiar, usually delicious*, and the epitome of a midwestern lunch food.
I myself am a crunchy-tuna-salad person, and I appreciate textural variety. I eschew mayo (ugh.) in favor of creamy cool yogurts, tangy mustards, and tongue-tingling hot sauces. My tuna salad will always have pickles and onions. Occasionally carrots, boiled eggs, and celery will make an appearance, depending on how much time I have. If I want to stretch the recipe as far as I can and clear out my pantry, I’ll add beans. My moods dictate herbs and delivery vehicles – bread, crackers, chips, spoon. Very rarely will I amp it up to a tuna melt.
Tuna salad was one of the first recipes I “cooked” with my mom. We’d open the can of fish. We’d cut up the carrots, celery, and green onion. We’d mix it all together with mayo**, salt, pepper. We’d spread it on a slice of whole wheat honey oat bread. During the school year, she’d pack the mix and the bread separately, so that it wouldn’t get soggy. That lunch, next to the rare peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich, was like striking gold in my Little Mermaid lunch box.
When I moved to Chicago, I turned to the faithful tuna salad as a cheap, satisfying, and comforting meal. It took very little time to make, kept well for a few days (if it lasted that long), and the ingredients were affordable for someone making $9.50 an hour (plus tips) for a few years in Chicago.
When I was working an office job in the Chicago Loop a few years later (making much more than $9.50 an hour), I’d splurge on a fancy tuna sandwich from a french cafe a few blocks away. Gone was the mayo—this was upscale tinned tuna with herbs and olive oil and cucumbers on the crustiest baguette bread. It was heaven with hot sauce and an iced tea on a muggy Chicago summer day.
A few more years later and at a different job in the Loop making way, way more than $9.50 an hour, Pret A Manger (RIP) was on every corner boasting pricey, crappy-but-craveable, pre-made sandwiches that were great for those meeting-heavy days. I’d scurry down to the cafe in the lobby, grab a tuna sandwich and a packet of sriracha, and scurry back up to my desk to use the five minutes before my next meeting to house the thing. It was expensive for what it was, but the lunchy comfort was what I needed, so I was willing to drop the $10 (!!!) for a crappy sandwich.
Now, navigating a remote job in the post-pandemic*** peak, I have the luxury of taking a real lunch hour and indulging my own custom tuna sandwich mixes. But I usually stick with my standard tuna salad mix, swapping in crackers here or whole wheat bread there depending on the day.
Tuna salad may not ever be sighted on a Michelin-star menu or win a glitzy cooking competition award, but it’s a meal that connects many of us through it’s ubiquity while highlighting our uniqueness in its ingredient list.
*Look, we’ve all had a bad tuna salad—you know the mix: gloopy with mayo (or worse, miracle whip), barely a fish chunk in sight, and absolutely no mix-ins or fixins. Mine were from the school dining hall. I’d imagine a gas station sandwich to be similar, if not worse. However, don’t let these bad actors taint your view of a good tuna salad—there are a lot more out there than there are bad ones.
**Mayo before I had a choice in the matter.
***We are decidedly not “out” of the pandemic in the scientific sense, but socially and medically, we’re past the peak uncertainty. Stay home if you’re sick. Get vaxxed. Don’t be an asshole.
Recipe: A Not-So-Basic Tuna Salad
Ingredients:
1 can high-quality tuna packed in olive oil
1/3 cup each of:
Carrots, petite diced or thin sliced
Red onion, petite diced
Kosher dill pickle, petite diced
Celery, petite diced (don’t be afraid to go after the leafy inner ribs that you usually toss; there’s so much herbaceous flavor there)
2-3 green onions, cleaned and sliced
½-ish cup of plain greek yogurt
1 Tbsp-ish each of:
A good yellow mustard
Sriracha or your preferred hot sauce
Salt and pepper to taste
Directions:
Empty the tuna, oil and all, into a bowl. Flake the fish until no large pieces remain. If needed, add a bit more of your own olive oil.
Add everything else and toss together with a fork until well-mixed and tastes good.
Serve on, with, or using a mouth delivery vehicle of choice. Lately, I prefer butter crackers or pita chips.
Optional additions:
A medium-boiled egg, haphazardly chopped up because who the hell knows how to neatly dice up a boiled egg.
Potato chips (a la J. Kenji Lopez-Alt).
White beans (a la Martha Rose Schulman).