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TURKEY SALAD (American)
Take the white meat of a young turkey that has been boiled. Skin and mince this small, and set it aside covered. Then cut up an equal quantity of celery, add it to the meat, and season with salt and white pepper. Make a sauce as follows. Take three hard-boiled eggs, one raw egg, a table-spoonful of castor sugar, a large tea-spoonful each of salt, mixed mustard, and white pepper, a good pinch each of cayenne and nutmeg, half a gill of vinegar, and half its measure of oil or cream. The hard yolks and raw egg are first blended with the oil, the other ingredients are put in by degrees, the vinegar being added last of all by spoonfuls. This is then mixed with the meat and celery and piled in a bowl, the top being garnished with the whites of the eggs, and some celery tops, together with anything to give a little colour, such as beetroot or fancy shapes of tongue.
A boiled-fowl salad in the American manner, bound with a cooked-yolk dressing rather than a whisked mayonnaise. The measurements are Victorian and the seasoning is heavy by current taste.
- The hinge: build the dressing on the hard yolksSieve the three hard-boiled yolks to a smooth paste before anything else goes in, then work in the raw egg and the oil a little at a time. A lumpy yolk base will never come smooth once the vinegar is in, and the vinegar must go in last, by spoonfuls, or the sauce splits.
- Half a gillA gill is a quarter of a pint, so half a gill is about 2 1/2 fl oz (roughly 70 ml) of vinegar in imperial measure. "Half its measure of oil or cream" is therefore a little over 2 tablespoons — a sharp dressing by modern standards, and worth reversing the proportions if you want something closer to a mayonnaise.
- The salt is out of scaleA large teaspoon each of salt, mustard and white pepper is aimed at a dressing meant to season a large bowl of bland boiled meat. Start with a quarter of the salt and the pepper, taste against the turkey, and build up.
- Castor sugar and mixed mustardCastor sugar is superfine sugar; ordinary granulated dissolves well enough in the vinegar. "Mixed mustard" means mustard powder already slaked with water — English prepared mustard is the direct equivalent, not a grainy or Dijon-style condiment.
- Raw egg in an uncooked sauceThe single raw egg is never heated. Use a pasteurised egg, or leave it out and slacken the yolk paste with a little more oil; the dressing loses some body but nothing else.
- Boiled, not roastedThe recipe specifies white meat from a turkey that has been boiled; whether the bird was poached for this dish or eaten hot the day before is not stated. Poached or gently simmered breast gives the right texture; leftover roast turkey is drier and will drink up more dressing.
- Cut, do not mince to paste"Mince this small" here means a fine dice, roughly the size of the celery pieces. Machine-chopping turns the meat pasty and the salad reads as a sandwich filling.
- Yield and servingMade with the breast of a young turkey and an equal volume of celery, this fills a large bowl and will serve a cold table generously, though the recipe gives no quantities and any headcount is a guess. Dress it no more than an hour ahead and keep it refrigerated; the celery weeps if it stands.
Cassell's flags the dish as American because the pairing of cold boiled fowl with raw celery was, by the later nineteenth century, an unmistakably American habit — chicken salad in this form was a fixture of church suppers, railway dining rooms and hotel cold tables long before it settled into British cookery. The dressing is not a mayonnaise but a mixture built on sieved hard yolks, mustard, sugar and vinegar. The garnish — the chopped whites, celery tops, beetroot and "fancy shapes of tongue" — reflects the period's insistence that a salad from the cold larder should still arrive at table looking composed.