Home › Salads › Chicken Salad (Two large fowls)
Chicken Salad (Two large fowls)
Two large fowls.
Yolks of twelve eggs.
Half pint sweet oil.
Half pint vinegar.
One gill of mixed mustard.
One small teaspoonful cayenne.
Salt to taste.
Add two large heads of choice celery, or three small ones. After dressing is mixed thoroughly, and stirred until very smooth, pour over the fowls and celery, which have been previously minced fine. Do not add the dressing until ready to serve.
A banquet-scale chicken salad with a cooked-fowl base and an egg-yolk dressing built like mayonnaise. The quantities are for a crowd, and the dressing is the part that needs attention.
- Scale and yieldTwo large fowls with two heads of celery makes roughly 4-5 quarts of salad, enough for 16 to 20 servings. Halving or quartering the whole recipe works cleanly, including the dressing.
- Fowl means a stewing henA "large fowl" was a mature laying hen of roughly 4-6 lb, tough and deeply flavoured, and needing long gentle simmering until tender; the recipe assumes the birds are already cooked and says nothing about how. Supermarket broilers are far younger; two 4-5 lb roasting chickens, poached and cooled in their liquid, are the practical substitute, and the meat should be cooked and chilled before mincing.
- Archaic measuresHalf a pint is one cup; a gill is half a cup. So the dressing is 1 cup oil, 1 cup vinegar, 1/2 cup mixed mustard and twelve yolks.
- Sweet oil and mixed mustardSweet oil is mild olive oil, not a flavourless seed oil, though either works. "Mixed mustard" is mustard flour slaked with water or vinegar to a paste — closest today to a plain English or Dijon-style prepared mustard. Half a cup of it is assertive by design; taste as you go if that worries you.
- Raw yolksThe recipe never cooks the eggs, so the dressing is an uncooked emulsion in the mayonnaise family. Use pasteurised eggs or pasteurised yolks if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, and keep the dressing refrigerated until it goes on the salad.
- Getting it smooth"Stirred until very smooth" is the hinge. Beat the yolks with the mustard, salt and cayenne first, then add the oil in a slow thread until it thickens, and only then let the vinegar down into it. Dumping oil and vinegar in together will break the emulsion.
- CayenneOne small teaspoon across this volume reads as warmth rather than heat. Start with half if your cayenne is fresh and fierce.
- Dress at the last momentThe instruction is not decorative. Celery weeps and goes limp under salt and acid, and the chicken absorbs vinegar until it tastes pickled. Keep meat, celery and dressing separate and cold, and combine as it goes to the table.
Chicken salad of this kind — minced cooked fowl, celery, and a mustard-heavy egg dressing — was a fixture of American church suppers, weddings and "collations" from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and its appearance here reflects that: the yield is far larger than a family dinner requires. Celery is doing real work in the dish. It was still a somewhat prestigious vegetable in this period, sold in tall glass celery vases at table, and "two large heads of choice celery" signals a recipe meant to impress. The dressing is essentially mayonnaise made in the older, generous manner, with a whole gill of mustard rather than the discreet spoonful later cooks used; whether the yolks were meant to be raw or hard-boiled is not settled by the instruction to stir until very smooth, since period salad dressings were commonly made with hard-boiled yolks rubbed smooth.