Egg salad is one of those dishes of which there is no in-between; you either love it or you most definitely don’t.
It will never be known precisely who invented egg salad, but it likely originated from the English layered salad salmagundi. In the 17th and 18th centuries England salmagundi was a popular dish made with layers of ingredients including boiled eggs. Salmagundi was also popular with Colonial America. It was, however, a world apart from egg salad that we know it today.
Another popular theory attributes the birth of egg salad in 1756 to Mahon in the Balearic Islands, Spain’s archipelago in the Mediterranean Sea. During the French siege of Minorca, the Duke of Richelieu requested his chef to create a sauce with the few ingredients available; eggs were one of them. The sauce Mahonnaise may have been the beginning of mayonnaise. And what goes together better than eggs and Mahonnaise?
In the 19th century someone decided to put egg salad between two slices of bread creating an egg ...