Cut cold chicken or turkey in small dice pieces; add some cold potatoes, beets and celery, cut fine; sprinkle with chopped hard-boiled eggs, salt and pepper. Line the salad bowl with lettuce leaves; add the salad. Cover with a French mayonnaise dressing. Garnish with capers and beets.
October 25 — No. 25
Italian
A composed leftover salad with no quantities given at all — the proportions are yours to set. A few period terms and one structural problem (beets) are worth sorting out before you build it.
- ProportionsNothing is measured. A workable ratio is roughly equal volumes of diced meat and potato, half that of celery, and beets kept to a quarter or less so they do not dominate. About 3 cups of diced chicken serves four as a main-course salad.
- Beets bleedCooked beets will stain everything pink within minutes of being dressed. Dress and fold the other elements first, then add the beets at the last moment, or reserve them entirely for the garnish the recipe already calls for.
- "French mayonnaise dressing"The term is ambiguous and period usage varied; it most likely means a mayonnaise loosened towards pouring consistency rather than the clear vinaigrette sold as French dressing today. If you read it that way, thin a cup of mayonnaise with a tablespoon each of vinegar and oil and a teaspoon of mustard.
- PotatoesThe recipe calls for cold potatoes; a waxy variety holds its shape best, and dicing and dressing while still warm helps the potato take up dressing, which chilled potato does less readily. Floury potatoes boiled and chilled overnight are liable to crumble into the mayonnaise.
- Salt and the meatChilled roast poultry tastes flatter than it did warm, so season the diced meat on its own before the dressing goes on, not just the finished bowl.
- CapersRinse brined capers or the salad tips salty; salt-packed capers need a ten-minute soak. Either way they are a garnish here, scattered over the top, not folded through.
- ServingAssemble no more than an hour ahead and keep it refrigerated. The lettuce lining is structural as well as decorative and will wilt into the dressing if it sits.
This is the standard American "chicken salad" wearing a national label — the book's conceit is a dish a day from around the world, and by late October it is deep in a run of poultry entries, sitting between a German stuffed turkey and a Bavarian stuffed chicken. The Italian connection is thin: what marks it as Italian to the compiler is the beet, celery and caper combination and the composed, layered presentation, closer to an Italian *insalata composta* than to the mounded chicken salad of the American lunch table. Its real subject is the day after a roast. Diced cold poultry, boiled potato and a mayonnaise binder make a dish out of a bird already served once, and the lettuce-lined bowl and caper garnish are what turn thrift into a course worth serving.