My favorite summer comfort food is the fried chicken and potato salad dinner my mother made throughout my childhood — one I’ve spent three years trying to reinvent.
It turns out I’m not alone. According to a 2025 study by the Food Institute and Nestlé USA, more Americans — citing increased food costs, health concerns and a longing for emotional calm — are recreating the meatloaf, stews and other family meals they enjoyed as children.
But they’re not just copying old recipes — they’re reinventing them with bold new flavors and creative techniques, a trend called “new-stalgia.”
Though I’ve been experimenting with my mother’s fried chicken and potato salad recipes, I’ve not yet come close to improving them.
She’s 88 now and no longer makes meals to feed her large clan, but I was wise enough to capture her recipes and techniques on video.
Her fried chicken started with a very large family pack of thighs and breasts. She mixed some eggs and water in a bowl for the egg wash, then poured inexpensive, store-bought Italian bread crumbs into another bowl for the dredge.
The Italian mix included a blend of flour, onion and garlic powder, parsley, sea salt, paprika and white and black pepper — all tasty stuff.
She’d brown the bread-coated chicken in our ancient cast-iron skillet, then finish it off in an oven pan for 45 minutes more.
Her potato salad started by cleaning and then boiling 10 large Idaho potatoes. Once they cooled, and my father helped peel them, she cut the potatoes into cubes.
She boiled a dozen eggs, cut up celery and onions into very small pieces, then mixed her simple but incredibly special dressing — a cup or so of Hellmann’s mayonnaise, a few spoonfuls of regular sugar, an orange juice glass of condensed milk and a touch of white vinegar.
Her sweet, vinegary, watery potato salad is a one-of-a-kind creation — just as every family’s potato salad is!
My greatest fried chicken and potato salad memory as a kid involves my community’s “Kennywood Day,” when we spent the whole day at the Kennywood Amusement Park.
My father would pack our old green cooler full of ice, then stuff in my mother’s pans filled with the chicken, potato salad and a six-pack of his cherished Pabst Blue Ribbon.
We’d arrive at the picnic pavilion in the morning and set our provisions at the same picnic table every year — every family knew which was theirs.
We kids would meet up with our friends and hit the rides and roller coasters all day.
Then we’d return to the pavilion, absolutely famished, for dinner at 5 p.m. The chicken and potato salad were ice cold and devouring them was — and will always be — the most satisfying gastronomic experience I’ve ever known.
That’s why I’m having a blast trying different approaches and flavors — add some cayenne pepper to the chicken dredge or maybe some brown mustard and scallions to the potato dressing? — to make my mother’s creations even better.
Hey, maybe a little new-stalgia can calm all of us down — because food has a special way of bringing us together.
By sharing our creative takes on our most cherished comfort meals — by breaking bread together — I’m confident we’ll realize our passions, hopes and beliefs are far more common than they are different.
Especially if the meal involves my mother’s incredibly delicious fried chicken and potato salad!
Email Tom Purcell at [email protected].
