Chicken Salad
Boil two chickens, remove the skin and bones; when cold chop quite fine, add the white part of three bunches of celery; pour over the above a short time before serving; yolks of seven hard boiled eggs mashed fine and smooth, into which rub a gill of mixed mustard, add a small tea-cup sweet oil or a cup melted butter, one-half pint vinegar, one tablespoon salt, one-fourth teaspoon cayenne pepper. In summer, lettuce can be used or catbage instead of celery.
A cold boiled-fowl salad bound with a mustard-and-egg-yolk dressing rather than mayonnaise. The proportions are for a crowd, and the dressing is deliberately sharp.
- Dress it lateThe instruction to pour the dressing over "a short time before serving" is the hinge. Chopped chicken and celery sitting in a vinegar dressing weep and go limp within an hour; combine no more than 20-30 minutes ahead and keep it cold.
- A gillA gill is half a cup. Half a cup of "mixed mustard" - meaning prepared mustard, mustard flour already wetted with vinegar, not dry powder - is a lot, and with a half pint (one cup) of vinegar the dressing is bracing by modern taste. Add the vinegar in stages and stop when it suits you.
- Sweet oilSweet oil is olive oil. A "small tea-cup" is roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup. The melted-butter alternative sets firm in a cold salad, which is why oil is the easier of the two options.
- Two chickensBirds sold for boiling then were generally older and tougher than a supermarket roaster. Two birds of 3 1/2 to 4 lb, poached and picked, give roughly 2 1/2 to 3 lb of picked meat -- enough for perhaps 12 to 16 as a supper dish.
- Poaching themSimmer gently rather than boil hard; barely trembling water for 45-60 minutes, then cool the birds in their liquid so the breast does not dry. Chop when fully cold, as directed, or the meat shreds.
- Three bunches of celeryA "bunch" is a whole head. Three heads' worth of pale inner ribs is about 4 to 5 cups chopped - the salad is meant to be nearly half celery.
- Seven yolksHard-cook the eggs, press the yolks through a sieve, then work in the mustard and beat in the oil slowly as for mayonnaise. Cooked yolks will not emulsify as tightly as raw ones, so expect a thick, slightly grainy dressing rather than a glossy one.
- SaltOne tablespoon is a great deal of salt, though the volume of dressing is large. If the poaching water was salted, start with half and taste.
Chicken salad in nineteenth-century American cookbooks was often a supper dish rather than a lunch-counter one: it belonged with the cold table set out after evening entertainments, alongside dishes like scalloped oysters and cold ham, and it was made in quantity. The dressing here uses hard-boiled yolks rather than raw ones, an older style that circulated in American home kitchens alongside raw-yolk mayonnaise. Celery was a comparatively costly, carefully blanched vegetable in the period, which may be why the substitution of lettuce or cabbage is offered only "in summer."