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English Walnut and Chicken Salad
For this salad there will be required twenty-four English walnuts, onion, parsley, chicken liquor, celery, cold cooked chicken, French dressing and mayonnaise dressing. Take one pint of the chicken cut into dice, one pint of celery cut into dice, and parboil the English walnuts long enough to remove the skins. In boiling the nuts, add a slice of onion, a sprig of parsley and a little chicken liquor, then drain, remove the brown skins and mix them with the celery and chicken. Pour over this a cup of French dressing and put in the refrigerator for an hour or more. At serving time, stir half a pint of mayonnaise dressing into this. Make shells of crisp lettuce leaves, put a tablespoon of salad in each and a teaspoon of the mayonnaise on top, and serve. Ella E. Woodbridge
A late-Victorian composed salad that depends on two dressings doing different jobs: a vinaigrette that marinates, and a mayonnaise that binds at the last minute. Keep them separate as long as the recipe tells you to.
- The hinge: dress twiceThe French dressing is a marinade for the chicken, celery and nuts, and the mayonnaise goes in only at serving time. If you add the mayonnaise early it thins and separates as the vegetables weep, and the salad turns to soup.
- English walnutsThe period name distinguishes the common Persian walnut from the native American black walnut, which is stronger and oilier. Twenty-four whole nuts in the shell yield roughly a cup of halves; a cup of shelled walnut halves is the practical substitute.
- Skinning the nutsModern shelled walnuts still carry the bitter papery skin, so the parboil is worth doing: two to three minutes in simmering liquid, then drain and rub the skins off in a towel. Longer than that and the nuts go soft and waterlogged.
- Chicken liquorThis is the broth the chicken was poached in, not a spirit. A few tablespoons of any unsalted chicken stock in the blanching water does the same thing, and the onion slice and parsley sprig are there to season the nuts, not the broth.
- French dressing, 1900 senseOil and vinegar with salt and pepper, roughly three to one, whisked and used at once. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today.
- A pint is two cupsA pint of diced cooked chicken is about 10 oz of meat, roughly the yield of two poached breasts or one small bird. A pint of diced celery is four to five stalks.
- Drain before bindingAfter an hour or more in the refrigerator there will be loose vinaigrette in the bowl. Pour it off before stirring in the half pint (one cup) of mayonnaise, or the coating will be slack.
- Mayonnaise and raw eggA period mayonnaise is uncooked yolk. Use commercial mayonnaise or pasteurised eggs, and keep the finished salad cold; it should not sit out at room temperature while lettuce cups are filled.
- YieldAbout five cups of salad. At a tablespoon per lettuce cup this fills a great many small canapé-style portions; for lunch plates, allow roughly three-quarters of a cup each and expect six to eight servings.
Chicken salad bound with mayonnaise and stretched with diced celery was one of the defining American dishes of the 1880s to 1910s, appearing at church suppers, luncheons and hotel buffets alike, and the addition of nuts belongs to the same fashion that produced the celery-and-apple Waldorf salad in New York in the 1890s. The insistence on "English" walnuts reflects a real distinction in American markets of the period, where the native black walnut was the cheaper and more assertive nut; the milder imported Persian type was the one wanted for a delicate salad. Blanching nuts to remove their skins was routine in nineteenth-century cookery, done for almonds and pistachios as well, and the trick of doing it in seasoned broth rather than plain water shows the era's habit of flavouring every component rather than relying on the dressing to carry the dish.