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Chicken Salad (Chop fine one chicken cooked)
Chop fine one chicken cooked tender, one head cabbage, and five cold hard-boiled eggs; season with salt, pepper and mustard to taste; warm one pint vinegar, add half a tea-cup butter, stir until melted, pour hot over the mixture, stir thoroughly, and set away to cool. -Mrs. C. S. Ogden.
A cold-weather chicken salad dressed with a hot vinegar-and-butter mixture rather than mayonnaise. The proportions are generous and the dressing is sharp by modern standards.
- The dressing is the hingeWarm the vinegar only until it will melt the butter; do not boil it down or you concentrate the acid and drive off the volatile aromatics. Pour it over the chopped mixture while hot so the cabbage wilts slightly and absorbs it, then chill thoroughly before serving.
- A pint of vinegar is a lotNineteenth-century household vinegar was not standardised the way today's 5 percent product is, and its strength varied. Start with half the quantity, taste, and add more; the salad should be tangy, not pickled.
- "One chicken"Probably a stewing fowl, which might dress out anywhere from about 3 to 5 lb, giving roughly 3 to 5 cups of picked meat. A supermarket rotisserie chicken or the meat from a 4 lb bird poached until tender is a reasonable substitute.
- Half a tea-cup butterA teacup is generally reckoned smaller than a modern measuring cup, so read this as roughly 1/4 to 1/3 cup, about 4 to 5 tablespoons. Since the salad is served cold, the butter will firm up again, so keep it on the lower end.
- MustardMost likely dry mustard powder rather than a prepared condiment mustard. A teaspoon or two stirred into the warm vinegar dissolves smoothly and gives the dressing its bite.
- Cabbage, chopped fineOne head, cored and chopped small rather than sliced into ribbons. A whole head will likely give more volume than the chicken, which makes this closer to a coleslaw with chicken in it than to a modern chicken salad.
- Hard-boiled eggsThe recipe has the five eggs chopped fine along with the chicken and cabbage; if you prefer them to keep their shape, chop them more coarsely and fold in at the end so they do not break down during the stirring.
- Yield and servingThis makes a large bowl, enough for 8 to 10 as a side or 6 as a main. Serve cold on lettuce or with bread and butter; it keeps two or three days refrigerated and improves after the first few hours.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) grew out of contributions from Ohio housewives, and the attribution to Mrs. C. S. Ogden is typical of how the book was assembled — a compilation credited by name. The recipe shows chicken salad before the mayonnaise-bound version that became standard in American delicatessens: here the binder is a hot dressing of vinegar, butter and mustard, a technique that predates commercial mayonnaise. Cabbage would have kept in a root cellar through the winter, when celery and lettuce, the usual companions to chicken in fashionable salads of the era, were harder to come by.