Mix 1 cup of cold chicken cut fine with 1 cup of chopped celery, 1 cup of cooked chestnuts chopped and 2 green peppers cut fine. Season with salt and pepper. Put on crisp lettuce leaves in the salad bowl; cover with a mayonnaise dressing. Serve cold.
A straightforward composed salad; the only real work is the chestnuts. The proportions are equal by volume, which makes it easy to scale.
- ChestnutsCooked chestnuts means peeled and simmered or roasted until tender, not raw. Vacuum-packed or jarred cooked chestnuts are a fair substitute for one cup and save half an hour of peeling; avoid the sweetened marrons glacés.
- Green peppers"Green pepper" here almost certainly means a green bell pepper, used raw for crunch and bite. Two of them will read as assertive against a cup each of the other components — one may be enough for modern palates, and the seeds and ribs should come out.
- Cold chickenThis reads as a leftover dish, built on poached or roast chicken taken off the bone. Roughly 5 oz of cooked meat gives a cup diced; dice rather than shred so it holds against the celery.
- MayonnaiseThe period dressing was homemade with raw yolk. Commercial mayonnaise is made with pasteurised egg and works as written; thin it with a spoonful of lemon juice so it coats rather than clogs.
- AssemblyDress the mixture just before serving. Chestnuts absorb dressing and go pasty if left to sit, and celery weeps salt water within the hour.
- YieldAbout four cups of salad, which serves four as a first course or two as lunch.
Chicken salad with celery was one of the standard American luncheon dishes of the late nineteenth century, and books of this kind assigned it a nationality more by garnish than by geography — here the chestnuts and green peppers earn the label "English." Chestnuts were genuinely a fixture of English cookery, chiefly as stuffing for turkey and in soups, so a cook working through such a book would already have a pan of them boiled at holiday time. The daily-dish format — a page a day for the year, each dish tagged to a country — was in circulation in this period, and gave the household cook novelty without any real change of technique. The result is an ordinary mayonnaise salad wearing a passport.