Swan’s Down Salad with Napa Cabbage
Tasty, delicate, and light, it will brighten any table! Swan’s Down Salad with Napa Cabbage has an original and poetic name that fully reflects its essence and texture: it turns out airy and soft like down. This dish is sure to please everyone.
Updated : 14 May, 2026
Easy
About 30 min.
Ingredients
250 grams
Chicken fillet
100 grams
Chinese cabbage
2
Eggs
2
Potato
80 grams
Hard cheese
50 grams
Mayonnaise
to taste
Ground black pepper
to taste
Salt
Table
Table of volume measurements:
- teaspoon - 5 ml
- dessert spoon - 10 ml
- tablespoon - 20 ml
- glass - 200 ml
Preparation
Step 1
How do you make Swan’s Down Salad with Napa cabbage? Prepare all the necessary ingredients. Cook the chicken fillet in salted water in advance. Hard-boil the eggs. Boil the potatoes in their skins until done, then cool them.
Step 2
Pull the cooled chicken fillet into fibers so that they resemble swan feathers.
Step 3
Wash the Napa cabbage and dry it thoroughly. Slice the head into thin strips. Start cutting from the leafy ends, moving toward the core. It is better not to use the densest and toughest white parts of the leaves. We only need the leafy part without the thick white stem. It is most convenient to slice the cabbage without separating it into individual leaves.
Step 4
To avoid pressing down the layers while spreading mayonnaise with a spoon, I recommend transferring the mayonnaise into a piping bag or an ordinary plastic bag and cutting off a small tip. Pipe the mayonnaise onto the layers in a thin lattice pattern. This helps distribute the mayonnaise evenly and keeps the layers airy. It is better to use olive mayonnaise or mayonnaise with avocado juice, because it has a milder taste than Provençal-style mayonnaise.
Step 5
Peel the potatoes and grate them on a medium grater directly onto the serving plate. You can grate all the ingredients separately into different bowls and only then assemble the layers, but that increases the chance of pressing them down with your hands. That is why I prefer to grate each layer directly on top of the previous one. A medium grater works better for this salad than a coarse one, because the finer the ingredients are grated, the softer and more delicate the salad will be, and that is exactly the effect we want.
Step 6
Pipe a lattice of mayonnaise over the potatoes.
Step 7
Arrange the chicken fibers on top and drizzle them with mayonnaise as well. Every layer except the last two can be salted and peppered to taste, but I usually do not add spices to mayonnaise-based salads.
Step 8
Grate the eggs over the top and drizzle them with mayonnaise from the piping bag.
Step 9
In the same way, grate the cheese as the next layer and make a lattice from the remaining mayonnaise.
Step 10
Sprinkle the cabbage over the salad. Refrigerate for 1 hour to let the flavors meld, then serve. Delicious!
Author note
Share the recipe
