Welcome to Cold Salad Plate Summer

There’s a certain holdover of spiral-bound cookbooks and mid-century tearooms that I’ve been craving lately, a dish that simultaneously appeals to my sense of nostalgia and the way I like to eat right now. It’s a dish of many names — cold plate, cold salad plate, tri-salad plate, salad trio. You know them: chilled plates with ice cream scoops of protein-based, mayonnaise-bound salads, a big scoop of cottage cheese with fruit, and pickles, lots of pickles.

My family, with the utmost respect and affection, calls them “Old Lady Plates,” so named because I associate them with the graceful aging ladies of my youth — namely my grandmother and her retirement home friends. I can vividly imagine them tucking into their tri-salad plates as they demurely gossip in the well air-conditioned dining room of the Roanoker Restaurant in Virginia, where these plates were about as common as houseflies. Back then, they weren’t particularly glorious or noteworthy, they were just everywhere. And for me, a “picky eater,” they were a refuge from the hamburger-and-chicken-nugget insults of children’s menus.

Cold salad plates are less prevalent now, but they’re still around if you know where to look — namely, a certain type of establishment that carefully recreates the classics. In New York, Hamburger America’s salad plate presents a picturesque salad scoop, served with Ritz crackers and gilded with a single crinkle cut pickle slice on top — unfussy and perfect. S & P Lunch provides a path to a god-tier plate in its selection of sides: Egg, tuna, and chicken salads are available by the scoop, and there’s also a bowl of pickles and half of a cantaloupe with a dollop of cottage cheese on top. At Sarge’s Deli, there’s an entire menu section devoted to “salad platters,” which includes the standard tuna and chicken as well as, delightfully, chopped liver, and something called “California salad,” with creamed cottage cheese, fruit, and Jell-O. And at Joan’s on Third in Los Angeles, its updated salad trio includes tarragon chicken salad, tuna salad, and a lauded Chinese chicken salad.

Emily Nunn, author of the salad-obsessed newsletter, Department of Salad, is another champion of the salad plate. “I’m dying to revive an artifact left over from a time when Americans sat down at a table for lunch rather than eating in their cars or at their desks (like I do),” Nunn wrote in a 2023 post heralding the start of cold salad season.

The newsletter post offered a few creative variations from the standard formula, but when I called Nunn, who grew up in Galax, Virginia, just an hour or so from my hometown, she revealed her ideal cold salad trio veered toward the classic. “The thing that makes a cold salad plate so wonderful is that it’s like having a mini salad bar, but you don’t have to actually eat out of a salad bar,” Nunn says. “I don’t really want to eat a giant ball of tuna salad, but a platter featuring cute little scoops of two or three of my favorites — tuna salad, egg salad, chicken salad — surrounded by pickled things? That’s heaven.”

Old Lady Plates are similarly my idea of a perfect meal, a choose-your-own-adventure situation where there are no wrong answers, just infinite possibilities. Most of the cold salad plate’s components are soft, but the crackers provide that essential crunch, while the pickles help laser through all that glorious mayonnaise. I’ve updated a few elements in my ever-changing version of the plate — sometimes substituting one of those trending chopped salads for a stalwart scoop. But for the most part, I let the dish be what it is — an easy and satisfying mingling of salad-y things.

Pinning down the exact origins of the cold salad plate is tricky because it’s not a single recipe; it’s more of a good idea. But in terms of the kind of restaurants that first served them, the earliest examples come from mid-20th-century tearooms, specifically the department store tearooms of the 1950s and ’60s — places like Neiman Marcus’ the Zodiac in Dallas, which opened in 1957 and offered “a bouquet of salads, pear filled with cream cheese and slivered almonds, chicken salad, and fresh shrimp salad” and Stix, Baer & Fuller of St. Louis, Missouri, with its “cold salad plate with potato salad in ham roll, tomato slice topped with chicken salad, cottage cheese in a lettuce cup, roll and butter,” which was available for 75 cents in 1955.

In the 1950s, these tearooms were almost exclusively the domain of upper- and middle-class white women. At the time, other restaurants were considered inappropriate for unchaperoned women. By contrast, department store restaurants were created to give women a place of their own, to socialize, to lunch as a verb, before carrying on with the day’s errands. They were by women, for women; and what women seemed to want, unanimously, were cold salad plates. It’s a hallmark dish of the “ladies who lunch” scene.

In her blog on the history of restaurants, Jan Whitaker writes that department-store kitchens “were often directed and entirely staffed by women professionally trained in restaurant management,” meaning their expertise was not the classical French (meaty, sauce-heavy) cooking that was considered en vogue at the time. “They invariably favored home-style methods of cooking. Dishes popular through the decades included chicken potpies, tomatoes stuffed with chicken salad, club sandwiches, and frozen fruit salads.”

There’s also a certain daintiness to eating a plate made up of salads and fruit, two items that have been pegged to diet culture (and, by extension, women) for the past hundred years. The salad plate is a distant cousin of the “diet plate,” a relic of the 1950s that may have included a combination of a hamburger patty (no bun), cottage cheese, fruit, or any of the typical cold salads. The emphasis was on eating less hearty fare and cutting calories, with women as the target market.

But ultimately, Old Lady Plates walked so that Girl Dinner could run. In both cases, the idea is that these are the meals we’d make for ourselves (and our femme friends) if we didn’t have the burden of having to cook a full-ass meal for a man. In that context, there’s something delightfully exclusive and almost secretive about them.

There are still some original holdouts making proper salad plates. Nunn pointed me toward Swan Coach House, an Atlanta institution whose version boasts both cheese straws and another bygone recipe, frozen fruit salad. And as delis and diners have taken up the mantle, this is the perfect moment to revive salad plates for the next generation. After all, cottage cheese is enjoying another spin in the spotlight, as is gelatin — two non-negotiables on my perfect OLP.

“They need to become cool with the kids,” Nunn says. “Why are they not a keto thing? It’s egg salad, tuna salad, chicken salad — all with mayo. It seems to me like that would be huge.”

Stephanie Ganz is a writer and recipe developer whose work has appeared in BUST, Bon Appétit, The Kitchn, and Epicurious. She’s the author of the Substack newsletter But Wait, There’s More.