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FOWL (a la Mayonnaise)
Cut up the joints of a cold roast fowl. On a dish place a layer of picked lettuce; on this place a layer of fowl, sprinkling, as you proceed, with hard-boiled eggs, anchovies, cucumber, and capers, all chopped together; now put cress, chopped radishes, dry mustard; again lettuce; and on the top of the dish arrange the breast and wings of the fowl; garnish with hard-boiled eggs, in rings, and beetroot; and pour over the whole a sauce mayonnaise. (See MAYONNAISE SAUCE.)
A layered cold chicken salad of the sort Victorian kitchens built from Monday's roast. The construction matters more than the cooking, since nothing here is cooked at the point of assembly.
- The fowl"Fowl" in nineteenth-century usage generally meant a mature hen, often firmer than a modern supermarket bird. A 3-4 lb roast chicken, thoroughly chilled, should give about enough for four; carve the legs and thighs into joints for the layers and keep the breast and wings whole for the top, as the recipe directs.
- Assemble cold, dress lateThe hinge of the dish. Everything must be refrigerator-cold before it is stacked, and the mayonnaise goes on at the table or within a few minutes of it. Dressed early, the lettuce collapses and the sauce slides to the bottom of the dish.
- Dry mustardThis means mustard powder, sprinkled sparingly as a seasoning rather than mixed into a paste. A quarter-teaspoon across the whole dish is plenty; it is there to lift the anchovy and cucumber, not to be tasted on its own.
- AnchoviesVictorian anchovies were commonly sold heavily salted, and were often soaked or rinsed before use. Modern oil-packed fillets are milder; use three or four, chopped, and hold back on any additional salt in the mayonnaise.
- Cress and radishes"Cress" here is garden cress or watercress, not the mustard-and-cress punnet only. Watercress is the closer match for the peppery note the recipe is after alongside the radish.
- BeetrootThe recipe does not say; cooked and peeled beetroot is the safest reading, though pickled beetroot was also common as a garnish. Cut it into neat dice or small rounds and set it on at the last moment, since beetroot of any kind will bleed into the mayonnaise if it sits.
- The mayonnaiseCassell's cross-reference is to a classic hand-made mayonnaise with raw yolk. If the salad is for anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised, use pasteurised eggs or a good commercial mayonnaise loosened with a spoonful of cream and a little lemon.
- Yield and servingServes four as a lunch dish, six as part of a cold table. Build it on a shallow platter rather than a deep bowl so the top layer of breast and wings can be seen, which is the whole point of the arrangement.
Cold fowl under mayonnaise is a dish brought down to a scale a household cook could manage with yesterday's roast. It demonstrates a method rather than a fixed formula: layering, seasoning between layers, and finishing with a bound sauce. The dish belongs to the Victorian cold table, where a joint served hot on Sunday reappeared through the week in remade forms, and where visible economy was a virtue so long as the presentation concealed it. The vocabulary of the salad -- anchovy, caper, beetroot, hard-boiled egg in rings -- is remarkably stable across nineteenth-century English cookbooks, and the same combination underlies the salmagundi of a century earlier.