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Chicken Salad (Four chickens two bunches)
Four chickens; two bunches of celery to each chicken; one pint vinegar, two eggs, two table-spoons salad oil, two of liquid mustard, one of sugar, one of salt, one salt-spoon red pepper; make a custard of eggs and vinegar; beat oil, mustard, and red pepper together; stir into custard; add celery just before using. The above is sufficient for twenty persons. - Mrs. J. W. G., Richmond, In diana.
A contributor's banquet-scale recipe: a boiled vinegar-and-egg dressing rather than mayonnaise, poured over poached chicken and celery. The quantities assume a crowd of twenty, and the chicken cookery is left entirely to the reader.
- The hinge: cook the custard gentlyTwo eggs beaten into a pint of vinegar will scramble if set over direct heat. Use a double boiler or very low flame, whisk constantly, and pull it off as soon as it coats the spoon — around 170F. It thickens only lightly; this is a thin pourable dressing, not mayonnaise.
- The chicken is assumedThe recipe gives no instruction for it at all. Poach four chickens at a bare simmer, cool in the broth, then cut the meat into half-inch dice; two modern 4-5 lb birds may serve, though the size of the birds intended here is not recoverable from the text.
- "Two bunches of celery to each chicken"Eight bunches is a large volume by modern measure, and what a contributor meant by a "bunch" cannot be pinned down. Read it as roughly equal volumes of diced celery and diced chicken and adjust to taste.
- Liquid mustardThis means prepared mustard from a jar, not mustard powder. A smooth yellow or mild Dijon is closest to what was sold as "liquid mustard" or "mustard sauce" in the 1870s.
- Salad oil and salt-spoon"Salad oil" was usually olive oil, sometimes cottonseed. A salt-spoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so the red pepper — cayenne — is a small pinch, not a tablespoon.
- Vinegar quantityA full pint of vinegar against two tablespoons of oil makes a sharp dressing by current taste. Cider vinegar tastes fruitier and less harsh than distilled white to many palates, though the acidity is similar; taste the finished custard and add sugar or oil if it bites.
- Add celery last, and mean itCelery dressed in advance weeps and goes limp. Dress the chicken ahead if you like, fold the celery in within minutes of serving, and keep the whole thing refrigerated until then.
- YieldStated as twenty servings, which is about right for a buffet portion alongside rolls and pickles. Halve or quarter the whole recipe for a household.
Chicken salad in this form — cold poached fowl, plenty of celery, a cooked egg-and-vinegar dressing — was a common American "company" dish of the 1870s, the sort of thing that turned up at church suppers, lodge dinners and receptions where twenty or more had to be fed from a cold table. The dressing is a boiled dressing, one of the common alternatives to hand-beaten mayonnaise before commercial jarred mayonnaise arrived in the early twentieth century, and it used far less of the expensive salad oil. Celery was a comparatively costly market vegetable in this period, so two bunches per bird suggests an occasion rather than an everyday meal. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877), which grew out of a compilation made at Marysville, Ohio, was built from contributions like this one, each signed with initials and a town — here Mrs. J. W. G. of Richmond, Indiana — which is why quantities so often arrive scaled for a public supper rather than a family.