The Old-School BBQ Side Dish Chick-Fil-A Used To Offer

When you have chicken sandwiches as hearty and satisfying as the ones at Chick-fil-A, do you really need a side? That depends on your appetite, of course, but if you're still hungry after chowing down on the chain's classic chicken sandwich (or an order of their chicken nuggets, complete with dipping sauce), you have a few different options. Would you like their big, pillowy waffle fries? A side order of their mac and cheese? Perhaps some kind of sensible, fresh-tasting salad? What if we told you there was once another kind of salad on the menu, one that's much stranger and more colorful than its green-filled counterpart? Say hello to the Chick-fil-A carrot and raisin salad. (Well, maybe not — like we said, it's off the menu now, although it could have gone hard as part of the Chick-fil-A bowl hack.)

Chick-fil-A having a carrot and raisin salad made a certain kind of sense. This is a proudly Southern chain, from the fried chicken down to the devout Christianity that leads it to close on Sundays, and carrot and raisin salad is a staple of Southern cookouts. Although the dish had its fans, it was never the most popular side at Chick-fil-A. Still, it managed to linger for forty years, and Chick-fil-A was considerate enough to provide a recipe. (You know a recipe's a banger when the only instructions are "mix all ingredients together.")

Like we said, carrot and raisin salad is quite popular in the South. It's another one of those salads, like egg, potato, or macaroni salads, which have less to do with greens and more to do with whatever can be submerged in mayonnaise. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course — very few vegetables become less delicious when treated with mayonnaise and various seasonings. (The enduring significance of potato salad can attest to that.)

So what's this dish's origin story? Where did carrot and raisin salad come from? Well, we don't really know — there isn't even a bogus just-so story about some housewife in the early 20th century running out of lettuce and quickly shaving some carrots to salvage her potluck. What we do know is that many other cultures have some kind of carrot salad. In Russia, there is a dish called morkovcha that's similarly made up of shaved carrots; it's often called Korean-style carrots, as the dish originated with the Koryo-saram, or ethnic Koreans. It's also eaten across the Middle East and northern Africa, often incorporating lemon juice, feta cheese, and other additions.