Take ½ pound of chopped chicken, ¼ pound of almonds, 1 red pepper, 1 Spanish onion and 1 head of chicory chopped fine. Mix in a salad bowl with ¼ teaspoonful of salt, 1 teaspoonful of curry-powder, 2 tablespoonfuls of tarragon vinegar, 4 tablespoonfuls of olive-oil. Garnish with sliced beets and bananas.
A composed cold salad of the sort that filled the "national dishes" pages of turn-of-the-century books: cooked poultry, nuts, a sharp dressing, and a decorative garnish. The recipe assumes you already have cooked chicken to hand.
- The chicken is cookedHalf a pound of "chopped chicken" in a salad of this kind is understood to be cold cooked meat, roast or poached, though the recipe does not say so. Chop it into rough half-inch dice rather than mincing it, or it turns pasty against the dressing.
- "1 red pepper" is ambiguousIn an American book of this date this most often means one fresh sweet red pepper, seeded and chopped, but it could also mean a dried red chile or a pinch of cayenne. Given the curry powder already in the dressing, a sweet pepper is the safer reading; taste before adding heat.
- ChicoryIn 1900s American usage chicory usually meant curly endive (frisée), not the pale Belgian witloof chicons. Either works; frisée gives the bitter frizzy volume the recipe expects from a whole "head."
- Spanish onionA large, mild, straw-skinned onion. A whole one is a great deal of raw onion for a pound of salad; half of a large one, sliced paper-thin, is closer to modern taste. Soaking the slices in cold water for ten minutes takes the edge off.
- AlmondsQuarter of a pound is about 3/4 cup. Blanched almonds, coarsely chopped and toasted dry in a pan, hold their crunch far better than raw ones sitting in oil and vinegar.
- The dressingFour tablespoons oil to two of tarragon vinegar is a 2:1 vinaigrette, sharper than the modern 3:1. Whisk the curry powder into the vinegar first so it dissolves, and let it stand a few minutes; raw curry powder stirred into oil tastes dusty.
- The beets are cookedSliced beets in a period salad means boiled or baked beets, cooled and peeled. Lay them on at the last moment or they bleed pink through the whole bowl.
- BananasSliced banana browns within minutes. Slice it directly onto the plate as you serve, or brush the slices with a little of the vinegar.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. The quantities would stretch to about four as a light lunch course, or two as a main salad.
The "365 dishes" format gave one dish a day, each tagged with a country, and the tag was often more about atmosphere than provenance: here a Spanish onion and a scattering of almonds do the work of establishing nationality, while the curry powder belongs squarely to the Anglo-American pantry of the period. Curried mayonnaise and curried vinaigrettes were fashionable dressings for cold fowl on both sides of the Atlantic, by most accounts from somewhere in the later nineteenth century onward, and bananas — once the steamship trade was established in the late nineteenth century — appear frequently as a decorative garnish rather than a fruit course. The one gesture that reads as Spanish is the pairing of chicken, almonds and sweet red pepper, a combination often associated with the Spanish kitchen, though it would not normally arrive there dressed with tarragon vinegar and beets.