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Manhattan Salad
Lay 1 cupful each of chicken, celery, and apple in a marinade of lemon juice, oil, salt, and pepper. Stand for half an hour, then mix with a rich mayonnaise. Serve on lettuce leaves, and garnish with 2 hard-boiled eggs cut into quarters, a dozen walnut meats, and the sections of 1 orange.
A composed chicken salad of the Waldorf era, built on a short marinade rather than dressing alone. The original gives no proportions for the marinade and no yield, so both are worth settling before you start.
- The marinade proportionsRead this as a plain vinaigrette: roughly 1 tablespoon lemon juice to 3 tablespoons oil, with salt and pepper. It is there to season the diced ingredients from the inside, so use enough to coat, not to pool.
- Cut sizeAll three cupfuls should be diced to about the same 1/2-inch dice so the salad forks up evenly. Cooked chicken breast or leftover roast both work; poach gently if starting from raw and cool completely before dicing.
- The applePeel or not as you like, but dice it last and get it into the lemon marinade at once. That acid is the only thing standing between the apple and a brown, mealy look by serving time.
- Half an hour, no longerThirty minutes in the refrigerator is right. Left much longer, the celery slackens and the apple begins to weep, thinning the mayonnaise.
- "A rich mayonnaise"Read this as a proper thick mayonnaise rather than a boiled or cooked dressing, which period books generally treated as a separate thing. Drain off any marinade that has collected before folding it in, or the dressing will loosen and slide.
- Orange sectionsSupreme them: cut away peel and white pith, then free each segment from its membrane. The membrane is tough and bitter alongside mayonnaise.
- WalnutsA dozen halves is right for the garnish. Toasting them 6-8 minutes at 350F and cooling them first sharpens the flavour and keeps them from going soft on the plate.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Three cupfuls of solids plus dressing will stretch to about four lunch portions, or six smaller first-course servings on lettuce.
Named salads on hotel and club menus were common in New York around the turn of the twentieth century, and this one sits in the same family as the Waldorf: apple and celery bound in mayonnaise, with walnuts (added to the Waldorf in later versions rather than the earliest ones), here extended with cold chicken to make a meal of it. Compilations like this one gathered such restaurant salads under geographic names, and the specific origin of "Manhattan Salad" is not documented beyond the city it advertises.