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Chicken Salad (Choose a medium-sized fowl)
Choose a medium-sized fowl, boil it until tender and let it remain until cold. Then remove all skin, bones and gristle; cut up the meat, do not chop it. To the cut meat add a little salt and the white part of a bunch of celery. Toss up the ingredients with a fork until light, then set away on ice or in a cool place until the dressing is made. For the dressing use an ordinary egg beater. Ingredients for dressing are: yolks of three eggs, one-half teaspoonful of dry mustard, one-half spoonful of sugar, a pinch of cayenne pepper, one-half spoonful of salt, one teacup best olive oil, juice of one large lemon. Mix mustard, sugar, pepper, and salt with the yolks of the eggs, then add oil, one tablespoonful at a time; just before the last tablespoonful of oil, beat in the lemon juice; it will then turn white and creamy. Beat it thoroughly and add the remaining oil, beating well again. Spread dressing over the chicken and celery. If wished, chopped capers and olives can be added to the salad. If put on ice this dressing can be made some hours before using. -Mrs. E. A. Boice.
A boiled-fowl salad with a hand-beaten mayonnaise, the standard American ladies'-luncheon dish of the period. The dressing is the part that needs attention; the chicken is straightforward.
- "Fowl" is not a broilerA fowl meant a mature laying hen, tough and full-flavoured, needing an hour and a half to two hours at a bare simmer. A 4-5 lb supermarket chicken is tender in about an hour; poach it gently rather than boiling hard, and cool it in its own broth for moist meat.
- Cut, do not chopThis is the hinge of the salad. Hand-cut half-inch pieces hold their shape and stay juicy; a food processor or a chopping knife breaks the fibres and gives a pasty texture that no dressing will rescue.
- "One-half spoonful"The recipe specifies teaspoons for the mustard but then just says "spoonful" for the sugar and salt. Read both as half a teaspoon, in line with the mustard, and adjust the salt at the end.
- A teacup of oilA period teacup runs roughly three-quarters of a cup to a full cup, so about 6-8 fl oz. Three yolks will carry that comfortably; start at 3/4 cup and stop when the dressing is as thick as you want it.
- Building the emulsionAdding oil a tablespoon at a time is slower than necessary but very forgiving. Have the yolks and oil at room temperature, and if the mixture breaks, start a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the split dressing into it drop by drop.
- Why the lemon goes in near the endThe acid thins and lightens the emulsion, which is the "white and creamy" change described. Adding it before enough oil is in makes a loose dressing that is harder to thicken afterwards.
- Raw yolksThis is an uncooked mayonnaise. Use pasteurized eggs if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, keep it refrigerated, and use it within three or four days.
- Celery and additions"The white part of a bunch" means the pale inner heart, about two cups sliced. The capers and olives are worth taking up; chop them fine so they season rather than dominate.
- YieldA 4-5 lb bird gives roughly 4-5 cups of picked meat, enough for six to eight as a lunch salad. Dress it no more than an hour or two ahead so the celery keeps its snap.
Chicken salad in this form -- cold poached fowl, celery, and a hand-beaten mayonnaise -- was a fixture of American ladies' luncheons, church suppers and railway dining cars in the second half of the nineteenth century, and many turn-of-the-century household cookbooks carry a version. Celery was the usual partner, both for its crunch and because it was a prestige vegetable in the period, sold in tall glass celery vases and set on the table as a garnish in its own right. The instruction to use "an ordinary egg beater" implies that some sort of beater could be assumed to be on hand, though the phrase need not mean a rotary model specifically. The attribution to Mrs. E. A. Boice is consistent with the way community cookbooks were assembled, from signed contributions by local women.