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Chicken Salad (Boil one chicken tender chop)
Boil one chicken tender; chop moderately fine the whites of twelve hard-boiled eggs and the chicken; add equal quantities of chopped celery and cabbage; mash the yolks fine, add two tablespoons butter, two of sugar, one tea-spoon mustard; pepper and salt to taste; and lastly, one half-cup good cider vinegar; pour over the salad, and mix thoroughly. If no celery is at hand, use chopped pickled cucumbers or lettuce and celery seed. This may be mixed two or three days before using. -Mrs. Judge Lawrence, Bellefontaine.
A cooked-egg dressing rather than a mayonnaise, which is what lets this salad sit for days. A few of the quantities are left to judgment, so taste as you build it.
- The hinge: work the butter into the yolks warmThe hinge: work the butter into the yolks -- Mash the twelve hard-boiled yolks with softened (not melted) butter until the paste is smooth before any vinegar goes in. Add the vinegar in a thin stream, whisking; poured in all at once it can break the paste into grains that are hard to smooth out.
- "Boil one chicken tender"This means simmer a chicken until tender, not cook it hard. The recipe gives no weight or time; a 4-5 lb bird at a bare simmer will take roughly an hour to an hour and a half, and cooled in its broth yields something like 3 to 4 cups of meat. Keep the broth for another use.
- Proportions the recipe leaves open"Equal quantities of chopped celery and cabbage" is unmeasured. About 2 cups of each against 4 cups of chicken keeps the meat dominant; more vegetable stretches it toward a slaw.
- Mustard means dry mustardMustard probably means dry mustard -- A teaspoon of prepared yellow mustard would barely register against the half-cup of vinegar. An unqualified "mustard" in a recipe of this date most likely means mustard powder, which would give the dressing its heat.
- Vinegar strengthCider vinegar in the 1870s was not standardized and its strength varied, so it may have been weaker or stronger than the 5 percent product on shelves now. Add the half cup in stages and stop when the dressing tastes bright rather than sour.
- Whites only, chopped with the meatChopping the twelve whites in with the chicken is deliberate: they bulk out the salad and take on the dressing. Cut them the same size as the chicken so the texture reads as one thing.
- The make-ahead instruction"Two or three days before using" assumed an icebox or a cold cellar. Keep it covered in the refrigerator and eat it within three days; cooked chicken dressed and held at room temperature is the classic setting for staphylococcal food poisoning.
- YieldAs written this is a party-sized bowl, roughly 8 to 10 servings, which is why it uses a whole bird and a dozen eggs.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) came out of Marysville, Ohio, and its recipes carry the names and towns of the women who sent them in, here Mrs. Judge Lawrence of Bellefontaine, identified by her husband's office in the usual style of the period. Chicken salad was a common dish at American church suppers and banquets in the second half of the nineteenth century, valued because it could be built the day before out of a boiled fowl and held cold. The dressing is a cooked-yolk type rather than a true mayonnaise: hard-boiled yolks, butter, sugar, mustard and vinegar. Cooked dressings of this kind ran alongside whisked oil mayonnaise rather than simply preceding it. Celery was a comparatively expensive market vegetable in this period, and the recipe offers pickled cucumber or lettuce with celery seed as a stand-in when none is at hand.