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Chicken Salad
One large chicken boiled; when cold remove the skin and chop into a dish, over which throw a towel slightly dipped in cold water to keep the meat moist. When the celery is cut, put between clean cloths to dry.
Take one tablespoonful best mustard, the yolk of one raw egg, which drop into a dish large enough to hold all the dressing; beat well for ten minutes and slowly add to the mustard one tablespoonful vinegar. When well mixed add three--eighths bottle of oil a drop at a time, always stirring the same way.
Rub the yolks of six hard-boiled eggs very smooth and stir in half a teacup of vinegar. Pour this mixture to the mustard, oil, etc., stirring together as lightly as possible.
Add to the chicken one pint chopped celery, a little yellow pickle, and half a loaf of stale bread crumbs and the oil taken from the water in which the chicken has boiled. Salt and pep per to taste.
Pour on the dressing just before serving. If the salad is kept too cool the dressing will curdle.--Mrs. E.
Chicken Salad.
The meat of 2 boiled fowls chopped very fine. 2 or 3 heads of cabbage cut fine. 1 cup olive oil. 1/2 pint vinegar. Yolks of 9 hard-boiled eggs. 1 gill made mustard. 1 small teaspoonful black pepper. 1 small teaspoonful salt. Mix smoothly with the oil and then add the vinegar.--Miss N. Chicken Salad for Thirty-five People.
Yolks of 4 eggs beaten lightly. 1/4 box of mixed mustard, and salt to the taste.
Add slowly, one large sized bottle of best salad oil. Lastly, add two-thirds teacup of vinegar.--Mrs. C. C. McP.
Chicken Salad. 1 head cabbage. 2 heads celery. 2 chickens finely minced. 10 eggs. 3 small cucumber pickles. 1 tablespoonful mustard. A little cayenne pepper. 1/2 cup butter; 1/2 cup cream. 1 onion. 1 teaspoonful sugar. Boil the eggs hard, mash the yolks, put in the seasoning with a little vinegar.
Chop up the whites of the eggs, the pickle, chicken, cabbage and celery-then mix. If liked, add a little olive oil.--Mrs. O. B.
Chicken Salad.
Boil a chicken; while warm, mince it, taking out the bones. Put it in a stewpan with boiling water. Then stir together until smooth, one quarter of a pound butter, one teaspoonful flour and yolk of one raw egg; all of which add to the chicken one half at a time, stirring all well together. Season with salt and pepper.
Let it simmer ten minutes; then add half a gill of Madeira wine, and send to the table while hot.--Mrs. P.
Five contributed versions of the same dish, ranging from a proper hand-beaten mayonnaise to a hot creamed chicken that is not a salad at all. A few of the measurements are genuinely unusable as written.
- The hinge: temperature and paceThe first version's warning that "if the salad is kept too cool the dressing will curdle" points to a real difficulty, and it applies to the mixing as well. Very cold oil dribbled into a cold yolk is a common cause of a broken dressing, and a chilled finished dressing is more likely to separate. Add the oil drop by drop until the emulsion takes, then in a thin stream.
- "Three-eighths bottle of oil"There is no way to convert this honestly, since 19th-century oil bottles varied. Work by ratio instead: one raw yolk will carry roughly 3/4 to 1 cup of oil, which is about what a single yolk plus a tablespoon each of mustard and vinegar wants.
- "1/4 box of mixed mustard"Equally ambiguous. Mustard was sold in tins and small cardboard boxes of dry powder; "mixed" or "made" mustard means the powder already wetted to a paste. Treat it as prepared mustard and start with two tablespoons for four yolks, tasting as you go.
- A gillHalf a cup. A gill of made mustard in Miss N.'s version is a great deal of mustard for two fowls, and half a pint of vinegar with only one cup of oil makes a sharp, thin dressing rather than a mayonnaise.
- Fowls versus chickens"Fowl" generally means a mature laying hen, tougher and more flavorful than a modern broiler, and in these receipts it is boiled. A 4-5 lb roasting chicken, poached and cooled in its liquid, gives roughly 4 to 5 cups of picked meat and stands in for one of these birds.
- Yellow pickleA mustard-and-turmeric pickle of mixed vegetables, close to what is sold today as piccalilli or chow-chow. Cucumber pickle relish is the nearest supermarket substitute; the "3 small cucumber pickles" in Mrs. O. B.'s list are gherkins, chopped fine.
- Bread crumbs and cabbageBoth are stretchers. Half a loaf of stale crumbs will absorb the dressing and dull the dish, and it can be left out entirely. Cabbage may have stood in for celery, though one version here uses both; shred it very fine and salt it briefly if you use it.
- Raw yolksTwo of these dressings are uncooked. Use pasteurized eggs, or eggs you trust, and keep the finished salad refrigerated once it is dressed rather than holding it at room temperature.
- Mrs. P.'s version is not a saladMinced chicken bound with butter, flour and yolk, simmered and finished with Madeira, served hot. It belongs with the fricassees. Ten minutes of simmering is enough to cook the flour out; the wine goes in at the end so it does not cook away.
- YieldTwo fowls with cabbage and celery will serve twenty or more as part of a buffet. Mrs. C. C. McP.'s "for Thirty-five People" gives quantities for the dressing only, and assumes you already know how much chicken thirty-five people need.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, prints recipes the way they arrived: signed with initials, unedited, and often five deep on the same dish. That accumulation is the point here. Chicken salad was the standard cold centerpiece of American supper tables, church suppers and wedding breakfasts in the second half of the century, and it depended on two things becoming reliable at once: bottled olive oil, imported and expensive enough that Mrs. E. measures it by fraction of a bottle, and celery, which was still a somewhat prestigious market vegetable and which cabbage joins in two of these five versions — replacing it in one, and sitting alongside it in Mrs. O. B.'s. The dressings show the transition from an older sauce built on sieved hard-boiled yolks and vinegar to true mayonnaise raised on a raw yolk, and one contributor hedges by using both. Mrs. P.'s hot Madeira dish, filed under the same title, is a reminder that "salad" had not yet hardened into meaning something cold.