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Fowl, Mayonnaise Of
Take all the meat off one or more cold fowls, and pile it up on the centre of dish. Cover it with mayonnaise sauce (see MAYONNAISE SAUCE), and garnish with watercress and hardboiled eggs.
A cold-table assembly rather than a cooked dish, so nearly everything depends on the quality of the two components: the bird and the sauce. The entry assumes you already have both to hand.
- "Cold fowl"A boiling or roasting fowl of the period was a mature bird, tougher and more strongly flavoured than a modern broiler. Leftover meat from a 3-4 lb roast chicken gives roughly 1 lb (about 3 cups) of picked meat, enough for four as a light main course.
- How to cut itTake the meat off in neat pieces rather than shredding it: breast in thick slanting slices, thigh and leg meat in large flakes. Shreds go pasty under the sauce and the dish is meant to look composed.
- Season before saucingCold poultry is bland. Salt, pepper and a spoonful of vinegar or lemon juice over the piled meat before it is coated makes the difference between a salad and a plate of leftovers.
- Quantity of sauceAllow about a cup of mayonnaise to a pound of meat. It should be thick enough to cling and mask, not run down and pool at the base of the mound; thin it, if at all, with a little cream rather than water.
- Raw-egg mayonnaiseThe cross-referenced sauce is made with uncooked yolks. If you make it that way, use pasteurised eggs and serve the dish the same day, particularly for anyone pregnant, elderly or immunocompromised. A good commercial mayonnaise is a legitimate substitute here.
- Keep it coldPicked cooked poultry sitting under a sauce at room temperature is exactly the condition in which bacteria multiply. Assemble it chilled, keep it refrigerated until it goes to the table, and do not let it stand out longer than a couple of hours.
- The garnishWatercress wilts on contact with mayonnaise, so bank it around the base at the last moment. Hard-boiled eggs are usually quartered lengthways or sliced and set at intervals around the mound; capers, sliced beetroot or olives are common additions.
Mayonnaise dishes of this kind belonged to the Victorian and Edwardian cold table -- the buffet of luncheon, supper and picnic food that could be set out in advance and eaten without carving. Cassell's treats a cold fowl not as a leftover to be disguised but as a legitimate starting point: a roast or boiled bird from one meal reappeared the next day masked in sauce, and the technique applies to almost any cold cooked flesh, fish or vegetable. The name follows the French convention of calling a dish after its sauce, and the emulsion itself is generally traced to French practice of the late eighteenth century, though the etymology of "mayonnaise" has never been settled -- Mahon in Menorca, the old verb *manier*, and the town of Bayonne have all been proposed. Watercress and hard-boiled egg were a common garnish of the period, giving the green and yellow contrast that a plate of pale meat under pale sauce badly needs.