Home › Salads › Salads: English-Walnut-and-Chicken
Salads: English-Walnut-and-Chicken
Scoop out skinned tomatoes, fill with cold boiled peas and English walnuts marinated with French dressing or mayonnaise. Serve on lettuce. Cucumber Salad.
Pare cucumbers and cut crosswise in quarter-inch slices. Let them stand in ice water an hour, then take a sharp knife and pare round and round the slices very thinly, just as an apple would be pared, until there is a long, thin-curled strip. Put these strips on ice to harden, then put each one on a single lettuce leaf and serve on small plates. Put a spoonful mayonnaise on each plate and pass prepared horse-radish, vinegar, and oil with it. Brown bread cut in long narrow strips and spread with soft cheese is delicious with this salad.
Most soft cheeses must be thinned with cream to make them spread easily.
Grand Union Cabbage.
Select a small, heavy cabbage and roll back the outside leaves. Cut out the center, leaving the shell entire.
With a sharp knife slice the heart of the cabbage thin and soak in ice water till crisp. Drain and dry between towels. Add 2 green peppers cut in fine strips and mix with a French dressing. Pour over the cabbage and peppers, then refill the cabbage bowl. -STELLA A. DOWNING.
English-Walnut-and-Chicken Salad.
For this salad there will be required 24 English walnuts, onion, parsley, chicken liquor, celery, cold cooked chicken, French dressing, and mayonnaise. Take 1 pint chicken and 1 pint celery cut into dice, and parboil the English walnuts long enough to remove the skins. In boiling the nuts, add a slice onion, a sprig parsley, and a little chicken liquor, then drain, remove the brown skins, and mix them with the celery and chicken.
Pour over this a cupful French dressing and put in the refrigerator for an hour or more. At serving time stirpint mayonnaise into this.
Make shells of crisp lettuce leaves, put a tablespoonful salad into each and a teaspoonful mayonnaise on top, and serve.- ELLA E. WOODBRIDGE Olla Podrida Salad (a Spanish salad). 2 small apples, 2 medium-sized onions, 6 tomatoes, 2 cold boiled potatoes, 1 tablespoonful vinegar, 2 tablespoonfuls oil, Little powdered sugar, Salt and pepper, 2 hard-boiled eggs, Dash McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce.
Peel the apples and onions, and chop fine. Peel and chop 3 tomatoes, mixing the pulp with the apples and onions. Rub a few bread crumbs on MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK a clove garlic, and add them to the salad, also the potatoes, which have been sliced and chopped. Add to the salad the vinegar, oil, sugar, salt, pepper, and tabasco. Mix thoroughly together, and let stand about an hour. Cut the remainder of the tomatoes in slices, also the eggs, arrange on top of the salad, then mask with mayonnaise.
Egg Salad.
Boil the eggs hard, remove the shells, cut in halves lengthwise, and take out the yolks. Mash the yolks, using a silver fork; season with minced chowchow; add a little mustard sauce, a dash McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce, melted butter, salt and pepper, and, if desired, minced olives. Return to the whites of eggs, arrange on a bed of lettuce or cress, dress with French dressing or mayonnaise. If no olives have been used in filling the eggs, a few pimolas scattered over the salad add to its decoration. Jardinière Salad.
The named salad here is a chicken-and-celery salad extended with blanched walnuts, dressed twice: a soaking dressing and a finishing one. The hinge is the walnuts, which must be parboiled and skinned or the whole bowl turns bitter and astringent.
- Skinning the walnutsTwenty-four walnuts means twenty-four whole nuts, so roughly 48 halves or about 1 1/2 cups. Simmer them two or three minutes and rub the papery brown skin off while still warm with a towel; cold nuts will not release it.
- The aromatic blanching waterThe slice of onion, sprig of parsley and splash of chicken liquor are there to season the nuts, not the broth. "Chicken liquor" is simply the cooking liquid from the bird, or unsalted stock.
- A pint of diced chickenA pint of dice is about 10-12 oz of picked cooked meat, roughly one large poached breast plus a thigh. The recipe says only 'cut into dice'; a fairly large dice will hold its shape better after an hour in dressing.
- The missing mayonnaise quantityThe line "stir pint mayonnaise" has lost its fraction and cannot be read as written. For a quart of chicken and celery, about 1/2 cup folded in at serving is the working amount, with the rest spooned on top.
- Two dressings, in orderThe cup of French dressing is a marinade; it penetrates the celery and chicken during the hour of chilling. Drain off any pooled dressing before folding in mayonnaise or the salad will slump and weep on the lettuce.
- Timing and temperatureAn hour in the refrigerator is the minimum, but do not marinate overnight: the vinegar in the French dressing softens celery to limpness and dulls the nuts.
- YieldA tablespoonful per lettuce cup makes this a small first-course salad; mounded more generously it serves six to eight as a lunch dish.
English walnut is the old American trade name for Juglans regia, the Persian walnut; the qualifier is usually explained as distinguishing it from the native black walnut with its thick shell and far stronger flavor, though that is a generalisation rather than something the page itself establishes. By the 1890s California orchards were shipping it in quantity and it became a fashionable nut for salads and cakes. Chicken salad bound with mayonnaise and stretched with celery was a fixture of American ladies' luncheons and church suppers from the later nineteenth century onward, and nuts, apples or grapes were a common way of dressing it up for company. The lettuce cup service and the contributor's name at the foot both point to a collection built from readers' signed contributions.