The Myth of Madame Wu's Chicken Invention

I don't think Cary Grant showed her a salad

The back jacket flap of ‘Madame Wu’s Art of Chinese Cooking’

The story goes that Cary Grant, a regular at a Chinese restaurant called Madame Wu’s Gardens*, in Santa Monica, CA, told the restaurant owner, Sylvia Wu, that he’d had a salad at another restaurant and wanted her to put her spin on it. And thus was born the Chinese Chicken Salad.

I discussed this in the most recent podcast episode, below, with Jon Kung — his Asian Chicken Salad is made with arugula and grapefruit.

After looking into it further, I don’t believe that Cary Grant had anything to do with what Wu called her “tossed shredded chicken,” other than liking it a whole lot. Also, dishes called “Chinese chicken salad” (and they were not all the same, at all) had existed in the U.S. since at least 1903. More specifically, other Southern California restaurants were advertising the dish in the years before Wu added it to her menu, and they were using the term Chinese chicken salad, which Wu didn’t do for decades.

Grant and Wu had a symbiotic relationship. Someone could write a thesis on the Hollywood PR machine and put the actor and the restaurant owner front and center. Gossip columns placed Grant at Madame Wu’s pretty regularly starting in 1967, almost always with his lady of the moment, including wives Dyan Cannon and Barbara Harris. Barbara, and Grant’s daughter Jennifer, celebrated birthdays at the restaurant, and Grant went to Wu’s son’s wedding. He contributed a blurb for her cookbook, Madame Wu’s Art of Chinese Cooking, in 1974. She started publicly declaring her “tossed shredded chicken” to be his favorite recipe in 1976. (I think she held off on calling it chicken salad until 1988.) The story of Grant inspiring Wu to create Chinese chicken salad didn’t appear until 1994, eight years after he died.

There’s no way the two wouldn’t have told their press agents to get the salad story out there right when it happened, if it were real. It’s just too cute.

As mentioned above, the Chinese chicken salad shows up in North America arguably as early as 1903, though the Montana Chinese mission school’s printed menu didn’t include recipes. In 1929 the Boston Globe published a “Mock Chinese Salad” (here “mock refers to tuna, then known as “mock chicken”) (justice for Jessica Simpson) described as “similar to Chinese chicken salad and real good.”

This recipe sounds mostly perfectly average to my Millennial ears: tuna, lettuce, celery, radishes, and optional beets. It also has pineapple. That’s pushing it … but things are about to get way more experimental. Almonds are added in 1930 (neat, they’re still a key ingredient!), but then, barreling around the corner of 1931 … you guessed it, gelatin. The Chinese chicken salads that were not set in molds contained olives and mayo.

Here’s one with cream, lemon gelatin, and “chop suey sauce.” America is so exciting!

There really isn’t much of a through line for recipes called Chinese chicken salad for a while in history, but this 1947 recipe from the Safeway grocery store chain surprised me: chicken, bean sprouts, pineapple, cucumber, almonds, a dressing of mayo, salt, and lemon juice, and, fried noodles.

Los Angeles Times, June 30, 1963.

But here is the 1963 recipe for Chinese chicken salad provided by Arthur Wong, owner of Far East Terrace in North Hollywood, just over the hill from Madame Wu’s Gardens: chicken, bean sprouts, lettuce, green onions, almonds, sesame seeds, sugar, salt, MSG, pepper, oil and vinegar.

And, Madame Wu was advertising her dish as “tossed shredded chicken” through at least 1965. It wasn’t until 10 years later that she started combining the terms.

(In case you’re wondering like I was: the earliest mention of mandarin oranges in Chinese chicken salad I can find is from 1971.)

I think that Wu never intended to claim credit for what is now often known as Asian chicken salad. I think the media decided it was so, and she ran with it. There are many different ways to be an icon.

Of course I bought Art of Chinese Cooking on eBay. And it’s SIGNED.

*It’s always written as “Madame Wu’s Garden” now, but it started as “Gardens” in 1959; looks like it switched between March and June of 1969, after the new location opened in 1968.

Do we think Cary Grant invented a salad?

Kung Food: Chinese American Recipes from a Third-Culture Kitchen

1 For The Table

Related episodes:

Chicken & Waffles with Carl Tart

American Chinese Food with Edgar Momplaisir

Ruth Wakefield & the Chocolate Chip Cookie

Personal Foodways with Chris Scott

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