Chicken Salad
2 cups white meat 2 cups diced celery 1 cup Mayonnaise dressing 1 measure of French dressing The meat should be cut into even pieces, about one-half inch cubes. Marinate with the French dressing and set aside for an hour to season and chill. At serving time add the celery and Mayonnaise. Arrange on torn lettuce and garnish with cress, gherkins or stoned olives. Drop a large spoon of Mayonnaise on the top and fringe around with celery tips.
A straightforward chicken salad whose only real subtlety is the two-stage dressing: French dressing first to season and moisten the meat, mayonnaise only at the end. Skipping the first step gives you a duller salad.
- "1 measure of French dressing"Genuinely ambiguous — the book assumes you know its own French dressing formula and are pouring enough to coat. Figure on about 1/4 cup for 2 cups of diced meat; enough to gloss the cubes, not to pool in the bowl.
- How much chickenTwo cups of half-inch cubes of white meat is roughly 10 to 12 oz of cooked breast, about what you would get from one 3 1/2 lb poached bird. The poaching liquid is worth keeping for stock.
- Marinate in the refrigerator"Set aside for an hour to season and chill" was written for a cook with an icebox or a cold pantry. Cooked chicken in dressing belongs in the refrigerator, covered, not on the counter.
- Homemade mayonnaiseThe dressing this cross-references is a raw-yolk emulsion. If you are making it rather than opening a jar, use pasteurized eggs, and keep the finished salad cold — mayonnaise-bound salads are the classic vehicle for problems at picnic temperature.
- Celery goes in lastAdded at serving time on purpose. Celery dressed early weeps and softens; the point of it here is the snap against the soft meat, and the tips are used as garnish.
- Terms"Stoned olives" are pitted. "Cress" means watercress or garden cress, used as a peppery green garnish rather than as part of the salad bed.
- YieldServes four as a lunch course, or six on a buffet with other dishes.
Chicken salad in this form — cooked white meat, celery, mayonnaise — was fixed in American cookery well before this book appeared, and by the early twentieth century it is often said to have been a mainstay of the ladies' luncheon table. Its logic is thrift as much as elegance: it is a dish for the meat left from a boiled or roasted fowl, dressed up with a garnish. The layered presentation here, with torn lettuce beneath, a spoonful of mayonnaise dropped on top and a fringe of celery tips, reflects the period's conviction that a cold dish had to be built rather than merely tossed. Gold Medal, as a flour miller, published its cook book as advertising.