It’s the overly saccharine collab of the century! A new profile of best-selling author Nicholas Sparks in the New York Times’s real-estate section has raised the question: How has he kept himself alive this long? At age 58, Sparks has two-dozen novels under his belt — around half of which have been adapted into feature films — and this interview gives readers a glimpse into how he fuels this prolific output. The secret, it turns out, is lots and lots of Splenda where it doesn’t belong. Between descriptions of his North Carolina home’s sprawling view and fine oak details, the reporter describes what Sparks was cooking the day of the house visit:
Mr. Sparks spent the morning at his kitchen’s granite countertop chopping two skinless, boneless rotisserie chickens, a few stalks of celery and a Vidalia onion. He then whipped together a dressing consisting of mayonnaise, dill pickle relish, jalapeño relish, apple cider vinegar, salt, pepper, cayenne pepper and 16 packets of Splenda. “You can use real sugar, but why throw sugar in if you can use Splenda?” Mr. Sparks asked, adding that he tries to avoid carbs “most of the time.”
To repeat: Sparks was preparing a chicken salad with a dressing made up of mayonnaise, two different kinds of relish, and 16 packets of Splenda. He ostensibly did this for his health to avoid carbs and sugar. “Why throw sugar in if you can use Splenda?” he asked. Why indeed? Also of note is that this information is not presented as an observation from the reporter; Sparks wasn’t caught in the act. He was sprinklin’ packet upon packet of sweetener over cold chicken “Earlier in the day, before a photographer and reporter arrived at his home,” and just had to share with them what he had been up to.
The whole paragraph conjures mental images of the Dear John author ripping open little yellow packets and gently stirring them into a mug brimming with chicken and mayonnaise like it’s diner coffee. It’s one thing to sweeten a glaze, but chicken salad is served cold. Do the Splenda crystals even dissolve in the mayo? Do they make the chicken gritty? Why not just pour a can of Diet Coke in there and call it a day? It just, well, it just don’t sound right.
But Splenda’s website does indeed have a diabetes-friendly chicken-salad recipe, though this one really leans into the sweet with strawberries, canned mandarin oranges, walnuts, and poppy seeds in the mix. This is essentially a mayo-based dessert chicken salad, mid-century style. In light of this, the Sparks Special, as we’ll call it, doesn’t seem that bad. The official Splenda recipe calls for four teaspoons of Splenda, which works out to exactly 16 packets.
I trawled through Sparks’s collected works, which I had always assumed to be fairly benign, to see if they contained any hints to this culinary oddity. The closest thing I could find was in 2002’s Nights in Rodanthe, in which the budding couple shares a romantic dinner of roasted chicken with salad. Neither lover adds Splenda to either element of the dinner.
Sparks’s proprietary Sparks Special is not the first celebrity chicken-salad fixation to interest and mildly alarm me: I had to cross-reference his recipe with Bethenny Frankel’s various chicken-salad TikTok recipes. Despite helming possibly one of the world’s most famous non-caloric-sweetener-heavy brands, Frankel’s chicken salads don’t contain sweetener, or even sugar. Frankel will most likely weigh in on this situation on TikTok by the time I finish typing this sentence.
There’s a reason why he wrote The Notebook and not The Cookbook, I guess.
