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Chicken Salad
One roast chicken minced very fine, saucerful of chopped celery, three hard boiled eggs, a cup of chopped ham or tongue, a small piece of grated cheese, one small red beet chopped (not too fine), mustard, salt, pepper to taste; vinegar and cream sufficient to moisten it. Sprigs of parsley to garnish the dish.
— Mrs. Charles A. Chapman
A late-nineteenth-century chicken salad in the older sense: a bound, chopped mixture rather than large pieces of meat in mayonnaise. The measurements are casual, so treat the proportions as a ratio and season by taste.
- A saucerfulSaucers varied, but a tea saucer would hold something on the order of half to three-quarters of a cup, so figure roughly 3/4 cup of chopped celery to one chicken; treat that as an estimate rather than a fixed measure. The original is genuinely loose here; the celery should read as a clear presence, not a filler.
- The chickenRoasting birds of the period varied a good deal in size and were often smaller than modern ones; a 3 to 4 lb bird yields roughly 3 cups of chopped meat. "Minced very fine" is truer to the period, but a 1/4-inch dice holds its texture better and is closer to modern expectations.
- The beetIt means a cooked beet, boiled or roasted and peeled, not raw. Chop it coarsely and fold it in at the very last moment, or it will stain the whole bowl pink.
- MustardMost likely dry mustard powder, though prepared mustard was also common by this date. Start with half a teaspoon; it is there to sharpen the cream, not to dominate.
- Cheese"a small piece of grated cheese" implies a cheese firm enough to grate, plausibly a plain American factory cheddar. About 1/4 cup grated is enough to add salt and body without turning the salad into a cheese salad.
- The dressingVinegar and cream in place of mayonnaise. Whisk the vinegar into the cream rather than the reverse, and use no more than about 2 tablespoons vinegar to 1/2 cup heavy cream; thinner creams are much more likely to curdle under that much acid. The mixture should thicken slightly, which is what binds the salad.
- Ham or tongueEither works; tongue was often itself cured or pickled, so it is not reliably the milder of the two, but it is tender and does not fight the chicken. Deli ham is the practical substitute.
- Chill and serveDress it at least an hour ahead and keep it cold; the flavors need time to come together. This makes enough for 6 to 8, mounded on a platter with the parsley, or served in lettuce cups.
Chicken salad in American cookbooks of the period is often a way of extending one roast bird across a supper table, and this version is a thrifty example — chicken stretched with celery, eggs, a cup of leftover ham or tongue, and a scrap of cheese. Cream-and-vinegar dressings were one ordinary home alternative to mayonnaise, though mayonnaise-bound chicken salads were already in print in the 1880s, so the dressing is not by itself evidence of an earlier date. The chopped beet is decorative, a cheap way to get color onto a platter of pale food, and the parsley garnish does the same work. A contribution signed with a married name, as here, suggests a community or church collection, where part of the point of the book was to record who made what.