When Was The Tuna Salad Sandwich Invented?

Amongst the many American iconic sandwiches — peanut butter and jelly, the BLT, and the mighty cheesesteak — tuna salad is my favorite. While many of my elementary school friends loathed it, I was extraordinarily happy when I found tuna salad in my brown paper lunch bag. Even today, when I visit any sort of sandwich shop, I have a very hard time selecting anything other than tuna salad whenever it's on the menu (here are the chains who serves the best and worst versions). Needless to say, I'm thankful that this dish has been around all my life. My parents and even my grandparents never knew a world without the tuna salad sandwich, but my ancestors before them would have found the dish to be something very new.

The tuna salad sandwich was invented in the early 20th century, but its creation was influenced by several factors that had begun several decades prior in the 19th century. In the late 1800s, it was common for American families to salvage any leftovers they had from dinner,like chicken or salmon and vegetables, and mix them with mayonnaise. This "salad" could then serve as the following day's lunch. These salads proved popular, and became increasingly available at lunch spots often frequented by women. These establishments served their salads on lettuce. But as the 20th century dawned, canned tuna — an ingredient largely loathed by the public at the time — became another salad option.

At the end of the 19th century, the canned fish that Americans turned to the most was sardines. But in 1903, overfishing and ecological conditions nearly lead to the collapse of the sardine industry. So an industry executive named Albert P. Halfill began pursuing other types of seafood that could be canned. Halfill was based in Southern California where, at the time, there was an abundance of albacore tuna. However, tuna at that time was primarily used for animal feed and bait, and not considered fit for human consumption.

But tuna soon found a receptive audience, thanks to a clever marketing campaign that compared the fish to white meat chicken and lots of free tastings and giveaways. Tuna soon found its way on many restaurants' lunch menus.  But as more women began to work outside the home, they had less time to eat; to meet the need and speed up the lunch hour, eateries started putting tuna salad between slices of bread, making the tuna salad both filling and portable. Thus, the tuna salad sandwich was born.

In many ways, the early recipes for tuna salad looked similar to what we make today: canned tuna, mayo, onion, celery, and maybe pickle relish. Now, of course, there are dozens of interpretations, from using avocado as a mayo alternative and stuffing it in pita to adding kimchi and piling it on a bagel. But these are all still tuna fish sandwiches, brought to us for over 100 years.