Home › Salads › Chicken Salad (Boil three chickens until)
Chicken Salad (Boil three chickens until)
Boil three chickens until tender, salting to taste; when cold cut in small pieces and add twice the quantity of celery cut up with a knife but not chopped, and four cold-boiled eggs sliced and thoroughly mixed through the other ingredients. For dressing, put on stove a sauce-pan with one pint vinegar and butter size of an egg; beat two or three eggs with two table-spoons mustard, one of black pepper, two of sugar, and a tea-spoon salt, and when thoroughly beaten together pour slowly into the vinegar until it thickens. Be careful not to cook too long or the egg will curdle. Remove, and when cold pour over salad. This may be prepared the day before, adding the dressing just before using. Add lemon juice to improve the flavor, and garnish the top with slices of lemon. -Mrs. C. E. Skinner, Battle Creek, Mich.
A boiled dressing chicken salad from the era before bottled mayonnaise, when cooked egg-and-vinegar dressings were the standard binder. The proportions are generous by modern standards and the dressing needs a careful hand.
- The hinge: the dressingThe vinegar mixture must be held below a simmer and stirred constantly, or the eggs scramble. Pull it from the heat while it still coats a spoon thinly; it thickens further as it cools. A double boiler or a heavy saucepan over low heat is safer than direct high heat.
- ScaleThis is a party dish: three chickens with twice their quantity of celery. To scale down, keep the proportions — one poached chicken (about 4 cups meat) to 8 cups sliced celery — and reduce the dressing to match.
- "Butter size of an egg"Usually reckoned at about 2 ounces, roughly 4 tablespoons.
- Pepper and mustardA full tablespoon of black pepper and two of mustard suit a pint of vinegar and a very large salad. Reduce proportionally if you scale down; "mustard" here is almost certainly dry mustard powder rather than prepared.
- Vinegar strengthNineteenth-century household vinegar was often weaker and less consistent than today's 5 percent cider vinegar. Start with three-quarters of the vinegar, taste, and add the rest if the dressing needs sharpening; a splash of water or chicken broth softens it.
- Celery cut with a knifeThe instruction is deliberate: the recipe specifies cut, not chopped. Clean crosswise slices keep the salad crisp.
- Boiling the chickenBring to a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil and cook until tender and the thigh reaches 165F; allow an hour or more for a whole bird. Cool it in the broth for moister meat, and save the broth.
- Make-aheadThe advice holds: keep chicken, celery and eggs dressed only at the last minute, or the celery weeps. Both components keep a day, refrigerated.
Before commercial mayonnaise reached American kitchens, cooked dressings like this one, vinegar, butter, egg and dry mustard thickened over the stove, were in use for binding a salad. Chicken salad itself became a fixture of church suppers, ladies' luncheons and railway-town hospitality in the second half of the nineteenth century, in part because it stretched expensive poultry with cheap celery. Buckeye Cookery (1877) gathered its recipes by name and town from contributors across the Midwest, and the credit to Mrs. C. E. Skinner of Battle Creek is typical of the book's method: a network of household cooks submitting the dish they were known for.