Turkey Salad
Mince the turkey very fine. Have ready the following mixture for a large company.
Twelve or fourteen eggs boiled hard; mash the yolks smooth with one spoonful water; add to it pepper, salt, and mustard to the taste. Two teaspoonfuls celery--seed, one teacup of fresh melted butter or fine olive oil, and pour in strong vinegar to the taste.
Mix the turkey and celery and pour over the mixture just before eating.--Mrs.
A cooked-yolk dressing rather than a mayonnaise, built for a crowd and dressed at the last minute. Two things need settling before you start: the quantity of turkey, which the recipe never states, and whether the celery is seed, stalk, or both.
- Scale it yourselfThe recipe never states how much turkey. As a rough guess, fourteen hard yolks and a teacup of fat would dress something like 8-10 lb of minced cooked turkey with celery. For six, you might try three eggs, a scant 3 tablespoons of butter or oil, and about 1 1/2 lb of turkey.
- Teacup and spoonfulA nineteenth-century teacup is usually reckoned at somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 cup. The unqualified "spoonful" of water for loosening the yolks is most likely a tablespoon; it is only there to keep the paste from seizing, so add it a little at a time.
- Celery, twice overThe dressing gets two teaspoons of celery seed, and the salad itself gets chopped celery stalk — the last line assumes it without ever listing it. Roughly equal volumes of turkey and finely diced celery is a reasonable starting point.
- Butter or oil is not interchangeable hereMelted butter sets solid when the salad chills, and the dressing will look broken and taste waxy. If the salad is to be served cold or carried any distance, use olive oil. Butter only works if the salad goes to the table at cool room temperature.
- "Strong vinegar"Cider vinegar was common in American households of the period, though wine and malt vinegars were also used, and strength varied. The recipe leaves the amount to taste: add it a spoonful at a time until the dressing tastes bright against the fat.
- MustardMost likely dry mustard powder rather than a prepared condiment. The recipe leaves it to taste; if you use powder, let it stand ten minutes to bloom before tasting again.
- Dress at the last minuteThe instruction to pour the mixture over "just before eating" is the hinge. Celery goes limp and weeps water within half an hour of being salted and acidulated. Mince the turkey and cut the celery ahead, keep them cold and separate, and combine at the table.
- Mince, not shred"Very fine" is the recipe's own wording, so aim for a fine mince rather than chunks. A knife gives better texture than a food processor, which turns cooked breast to paste.
Turkey salad and its close relation chicken salad were among the ways Southern households used up a large roast bird, and they appear in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879). The dressing here is the older kind: hard-boiled yolks worked smooth with fat, vinegar and mustard, a technique generally thought to predate the widespread American use of raw-yolk mayonnaise and far more forgiving in a kitchen without ice or a steady hand. Celery is doing heavy work in it, both as seed in the dressing and as the crisp bulk of the salad, and its prominence marks the dish as cool-weather food: celery was a winter vegetable, blanched and stored in trenches or cellars, which put it in season at exactly the moment a household had a large roast turkey to finish. Marion Cabell Tyree's collection gathered such recipes from named Virginia contributors who already knew what a turkey salad should look like.