Chicken Salad
Measure twice as much of chicken as of celery, after both ingredients have been cut into small cubes. Marinate with French dressing. When ready to serve, add the mayonnaise and serve on lettuce leaves.
A skeleton recipe of the kind professional cooks wrote for each other: proportions, not procedure. The two things it assumes you know are how to cook the chicken and how to make both dressings.
- The hinge: marinate while cold, dress at the last minuteThe point of the French dressing is that the diced chicken and celery absorb acid and salt as they chill, which is what keeps the salad from tasting flat under the mayonnaise. Mayonnaise added early gives up water from the celery and turns the whole thing loose and soupy, so hold it back until the moment of service.
- Proportions in practiceTwo parts chicken to one part celery by volume, both in small dice. The recipe gives no quantities; as a working amount, about 3 cups diced cooked chicken (roughly 1 lb of picked meat) with 1 1/2 cups celery will serve four to six.
- French dressing, 1911 senseNot the sweet orange bottled dressing. In this period it means a simple vinaigrette: roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar, with salt and pepper, whisked and used at once. A quarter cup or so is enough to coat the quantity above.
- MayonnaiseIn 1911 this would have been house-made. Use about 1/2 to 3/4 cup, thinned with a spoonful of the marinade if it is too tight to fold in without mashing the dice. Commercial mayonnaise works, though it is sweeter and softer than the original.
- Cooking the chickenNo method is given; the recipe assumes cooked chicken is to hand. Poach a whole bird or bone-in breasts in salted water until 165F at the thickest point, then cool in the liquid so the meat stays moist. Chill before dicing; warm chicken shreds instead of cutting cleanly.
- Marinating timeHalf an hour to two hours, refrigerated. Longer and the acid begins to firm and dull the surface of the meat, and the celery loses its snap.
- ServingWhole leaves of a crisp lettuce such as romaine or iceberg, used as a cup rather than shredded underneath. A salad this plain benefits from something for contrast on the plate: capers, toasted almonds or a little chopped parsley are all period-appropriate.
Good Things to Eat was published in 1911 by Rufus Estes, who was born into slavery in Tennessee in 1857 and spent much of his career cooking on Pullman private railway cars before moving to the subsidiary of United States Steel in Chicago. The terseness here is a working chef's habit: the book is full of entries that give ratios and finishing instructions and leave the rest to a trained pair of hands. Chicken salad itself was a fixture of American ladies' luncheons, church suppers and railroad dining cars from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and the chicken-and-celery-bound-in-mayonnaise formula was standard enough by 1911 that Estes evidently saw no reason to spell it out. The recipe does specify a two-stage dressing, vinaigrette first and mayonnaise at the last minute.