Most chicken salad tastes flat, and the reason has nothing to do with the chicken.

Cold dulls flavour! Chilled food releases fewer of the aromatic compounds that carry most of what we experience as taste, and your sensitivity to salt drops at low temperatures too. A mixture that tastes balanced while you're stirring it at room temperature will read as mayonnaise and not much else after half an hour in the refrigerator.

Which means you season harder than feels right, friends! Two tablespoons of Spicewalla Classic Chicken Seasoning into a half cup of mayonnaise looks like too much. It isn't. That blend is built for hot roasted chicken, where the heat does half the work of pushing flavour into the air. Cold chicken salad offers no such help, so you make up the difference with volume.

Everything else here is texture and contrast. Celery for snap, toasted pecans for richness, dried cranberries and lemon to cut the mayonnaise before it turns heavy.

Give it thirty minutes in the fridge before you taste for salt. That's when the seasoning actually shows up! This recipe serves 4.