Hot Chicken Salad
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This creamy Southern chicken casserole (a.k.a a hot chicken salad) includes tender chicken, celery, and boiled eggs baked with a crunchy potato chip topping.
I’m bringing you a little treasure today in the form of my Granny Jordan’s old-fashioned Southern chicken casserole recipe. Back in the day, this baked chicken salad was regularly seen at lunch, brunch, dinner, potlucks, church picnics, and tailgating parties. It’s typically served as a savory dip-style casserole with bread or Ritz crackers for dipping, but more on that below.
This is such a quick and easy hot chicken salad recipe. All we need to do is mix our ingredients together, which are mayo, cream of chicken soup, shredded chicken, celery, onion, and boiled eggs. We add this to a casserole dish, top it with lots of crunchy and salty potato chips, and bake! That’s it! It will be ready in just 20 minutes.
This chicken casserole is so creamy, thanks to the mayo and cream of chicken soup. But it’s also super flavorful and texturized, as you have the crunch of the celery and potato chips combined with the tender chicken and eggs. Basically, it’s a taste sensation and you need to bake it immediately. Yes, really!
Recipe Ingredients
- Ritz crackers and lettuce (for serving)
- Mayo
- Onion
- Boiled eggs
- Celery
- Chicken
- Cream of chicken soup
- Potato chips
How to Make Hot Chicken Salad
Chop up your boiled eggs…
As well as your celery and onion.
Chuck all of those ingredients into a large bowl.
Then add the cream of chicken soup, cooked chicken, and mayonnaise.
Give it a good stir and it’ll look a little bit like this.
Spread the chicken mixture into an 8×8 casserole dish.
Top with crushed potato chips.
Bake at 350 for 20 minutes and your hot chicken salad is ready to serve. How easy was that?
Serve hot on a bed of lettuce with Ritz crackers.
I also have to admit I love to serve this baked chicken salad cold like this Southern chicken salad for sandwiches.
It’s delicious either way. Enjoy!
Storage
Store leftovers in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 4 days. Reheat them in the microwave, oven, or air fryer. I don’t recommend freezing the casserole as creamy sauces don’t thaw well.
Recipe Notes
Here are some variations to make this hot chicken salad recipe work for you:
- Add 1 cup of shredded cheddar cheese. You can mix this into the chicken casserole or add it on top along with the potato chips. Alternatively, add cheddar cheese to the casserole and sprinkle parmesan cheese on top.
- For extra flavor, add 1 jar of diced pimientos (drained).
- For extra crunch, add 1 cup of sliced/slivered almonds.
- Use any kind of cooked chicken, like rotisserie chicken, canned chicken, or shredded boneless skinless chicken breast.
- Add more veggies, like 1 can of water chestnuts, 1 cup of chopped red bell pepper, or 1 cup of sliced mushrooms.
- Garnish with chopped fresh parsley or green onion.
- Add diced cooked bacon for added flavor.
- Substitute the potato chips for toasted breadcrumbs, french fried onions, or crushed cornflakes.
- Add a tablespoon of bottled or fresh lemon juice for a pleasant tang.
Recipe FAQs
How do you serve a hot chicken salad?
I like to serve my hot chicken salad casserole on a bed of lettuce with Ritz crackers, cornbread, homemade buttermilk biscuits, or bread. But it also tastes delicious as a main dish with cooked rice and a side of fresh green beans.
Check out these other chicken casserole recipes:
Chicken Tortilla Casserole (Cooked in the Microwave)
Cheesy Chicken and Corn Casserole
Cheesy Chicken Broccoli Casserole With Rice
Ingredients
- 1 cooked chicken
- 1/2 cup mayonnaise
- 1 can cream of chicken soup
- 2 chopped boiled eggs
- 3/4 cup diced celery
- 1/2 onion, diced
- 1/3 cup cracker crumbs (optional)
- 1 cup potato chips
- Ritz crackers and lettuce for serving (optional)
Instructions
- Mix chicken, mayo, soup, eggs, celery, onion, and cracker crumbs in a medium bowl.1 cooked chicken, 1/2 cup mayonnaise, 1 can cream of chicken soup, 2 chopped boiled eggs, 3/4 cup diced celery, 1/2 onion, diced, 1/3 cup cracker crumbs (optional)
- Spread into an 8x8 baking dish and top with crushed potato chips.1 cup potato chips
- Bake at 350 for 20 minutes.
- Serve hot or cold over a bed of lettuce with Ritz crackers.Ritz crackers and lettuce for serving (optional)
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Each day when you wake up you have a choice. You can have a good day or you can have a bad day. So you might as well have a good one.
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What a beautiful young lady Granny Jordan was ! I’m trying the recipe today. Thanks for sharing it and your story.
Hey Ann, thank you!!
Please let us know how you like it if you get a chance! hope you had a lovely day!
Gratefully,
Christy 🙂
Oh please tell me you will be getting in more cookbooks any day now, I just mailed my order yesterday.
I love all of your recipes and have tried several and we loved them,
The only thing I would change is an easier way to copy recipes in our newsletters.
Could you possibly put ‘Print’ in a little box at the end of your newsletter, then all we would have to do is click print and there the recipe is.
Hey Mary!
Don’t worry, I took down my payment buttons on the website while I still had plenty to fill existing orders so you’re good! Thank you for ordering it!
I have looked into different ways to make them printer friendly but the problem for me right now is simply time. With the kids and house and all of the other things I am juggling, most days I’m doing good to get the post up! lol
That’s why I started sending out printer friendly versions of my recipes to email subscribers. I sent them out usually about twice a month. Also, I have instructions for how to copy/paste/and print just the recipe under my FAQ section. To subscribe or to view the FAQ, see the links at the top of the page. I hope this helps and thank you SO MUCH for your ideas!!
Sometime in the future, maybe I’ll have more resources that allow me to work on Southern Plate more for y’all!
Gratefully,
Christy 🙂
Christy, thank you for this! Granny Jordan was a beauty. How special to have these recipes and that photo, and also to have come to know her so well!
My own dear mother passed on my 28th birthday. I have her recipe box, and am working through them, trying to create a cookbook for my daughter. It’s a slow, tedious process, because I’m not as organized as you! And I’m trying to decide which ones to re-type, and which ones to scan & leave them in original form, because I want to preserve the handwriting, etc. Any tips?
Hey horsechick!
You are so very welcome, and thank YOu for reading and commenting!
I am so sorry about your mother. I think we could all live to be a hundred and ten and still want our mother’s near us. Having that recipe box is truly a treasure, I know.
If it were me, I think I’d type up each recipe and put them in order of chapters (typical cookbook chapters of appetizers, salads, main courses, desserts, etc) and then I’d also scan each recipe and include those either as an appendix at the end of the book or on the opposite page of each typed version. Although, I think I’d rather have them at the end of the book because then you could flip to the back and sit back, leisurely visiting with your mother through her writings.
I know it will be an awful lot of work but you’d spend the rest of your life being so very glad you did it!
I hope this helped! Trust me, this was the first time anyone has mentioned me and the term “organized” in the same sentence!
Gratefully,
Christy 🙂
The chicken casserole recipe looks like one I was served at a luncheon years ago and always wished I had the recipe. I am anxious to try it to see if it is the same one I remembered. Maybe it is my schoolteacher background but I always thought the old saying was a wild hare as in rabbit. Does anyone else know???
Elaine, I was curious too and googled wild hair & wild hare and saw more of wild hair references. (Check this out Christy….you will love this site) See QuotesnPhrases.blogspot.com.
Heehee! You beat me to this one, Terri! lol
A wild hare is one thing but I’d pick a rabid, demon possessed wild rabbit over a wild hair any day!
A wild hair is one of those things that ~ahem~ as we tend to age…decides to sprout up in an odd place. You know how your spinster teacher had a single black hair growing out of the middle of her forehead? Bless her heart, she must not have had any girlfriends to pluck that thang for her!
In the South, we all gotta have one friend who is so dear, so close to us, and so trusted, that we can tell them where our wild hairs grow so they can come into the hospital and pluck them for us if we ever end up in a coma!
I actually remember one of my mother’s friends telling her “Now Jan, I got this black hair that grows out of my chin. If I’m ever on life support or anything, I want you to come in once a week and pluck that hair for me…Christy, that goes for you, too if you’re Mama can’t do it.”
Wild hairs are serious business, and they also act as a scape goat for why we get it in our heads to do things (as today).
Psst,Terri…you see this freckle on my neck? ~nods with a wink~ Be sure you use the good tweezers, too.
I just read this whole exchange to Mama and she said “And I told you that you gotta come do that for me if I’m ever in the hospital, too!”
What a beauty Granny Jordan was in the first blush of young womanhood. I have no doubt she grew even more in beauty as the years went by. I ran across a handwritten recipe in one of my old cookbooks. My mama went home in 1987, and it was in her her writing. I cannot tell you how overwhelmed I was for a minute by a wave of loving and missing her, just by seeing her careful hand. She had severe rheumatoid arthritis, it made it hard for her to write, but managed to keep all five of us “heathen” children in line. In her own shorthand, the recipe was entitled “PA Up Down Cake.” As I read on, I realized it was her pineapple upside down cake. Thank you for helping me recall some very happy times of sitting on a tall step stool in the kitchen, watching and learning from the wisest, strongest woman I have ever known.
Hi Jane, ditto. I have stood in your shoes many times, whenever I come across anything in Mama’s handwriting, especially a recipe. Thank you for mentioning the tall kitchen step stool, as I zoomed back in time too. Thirty-three years now without Mama never dims the wave of emotion always waiting to surface. ~gives u a hug~ Thank you for sharing.
Now I’ll always think of it as “Pa Upside Down Cake” and think of you and your wonderful mother. I know just what y’all mean.
My great grandmother passed away in November the year I turned seventeen. She somehow knew she was going to go, even though her health had been fine and her passing was very sudden. She had written out Christmas cards for each of us and signed them, putting a twenty dollar bill in each one. Lela was only able to go to third grade but she had always been very proud of the fact that she could write her name. Her hand was very shaky, seeing as how she had sight problems and was almost ninety at the time.
Christmas rolled around and after we had opened all of our gifts, we were each handed a card. Having no idea what it was or who it was from, I opened it up and read:
Love you,
Lela
I miss her so very much. She was one of the old fashioned ladies who wore dresses and could only recall putting on a pair of pants once in her entire life. She would wear house dresses during the day and then had fancier ones for trips to the grocery store, where she also wore her fancy shoes. Her dresses always had pockets and there, folded neatly, you would find a fresh tissue which she used to blot delicately at the corners of her mouth – to hide the fact that she actually dipped snuff. 🙂 She always used Bruton Snuff and saved the little tins for us. When we’d go to visit her she’d give us a little tin and fill it with coins or sometimes buttons, for us to take home.
When I got my first house, I was in the grocery store one day and noticed Bruton Snuff, in the little tin just like it used to be. I bought a tin of it and set it on the back of my stove to have a little more of Lela close to me when I cooked. I went to my brother’s house one day and walked in his kitchen and guess what was sitting there on the back of his stove?
Guess he misses her, too.
Gratefully,
Christy
Ya’ll are bringin’ back memories. My Mamaw only wore dresses, and a bun in her hair. She always had housedresses on during the day, and black and brown fancy shoes for shopping. I remember when she bought white sandals how happy she was (still wore the pantyhose though!)
You know, I’ve been wondering lately about using rotisserie chicken to throw together a quick chicken & dressing. Glad to see it worked well in your chicken salad! I love love love chicken salad on crossiants, but am usually too busy to cook up a fryer for it. That photo is beautiful.
Hey Melody! thank you so much! I wish I had better training to really make my photos pop but it seems I’m doing good on time to get the things posted anyway! lol
I always try to cook a fryer for things but have a bad habit of coming up with what I want to cook too late! lol
I have got to get better at that!
Hope you are doing well!
Gratefully,
Christy 🙂
Granny Jordan was so beautiful! She looks just full of life. And that casserole/salad looks so delicious. Yum yum yummy! I love those old, food-stained recipes of mothers and grandmothers. There’s just something so wonderful about them, and you know that if they’re that stained up they’re bound to be delicious. 🙂
AMEN! you are so right! lol
I’ve found also that pretty much any recipe written by hand is good. Usually folks got them from friends after they tried something and “just had to have” the recipe!
I miss the old days!
Hope you and yours are doing well, Stephanie! We’re getting ready for that little one to turn two soon, aren’t we?
Gratefully,
Christy 🙂