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Chicken Salad
Draw and singe a fowl, put in a kettle with just enough boiling water to keep it from burning, add a slice of onion, a bay-leaf, a few cloves, and a blade of mace. Cover the kettle and cook the chicken slowly until perfectly tender. This method of cooking will make the dark meat almost as white as the white meat. For special occasions use the white meat only; the dark meat can be used for croquettes or other chicken entrées. When done put the chicken away until perfectly cold; it is best always to cook it the day before using. Then remove the skin and cut the meat into dice. Cut and not tear; remove the meat from the carcass in as large pieces as possible. Cut with a sharp knife, laying the meat in blocks a little larger than ordinary dice. Under no circumstances chop it. After it is properly cut, stand away in a cold place until wanted. Wash, brush and cut the white part of celery into pieces a half inch long. Dry on a soft towel and stand away in the cold until wanted. Now make your Mayonnaise dressing according to the recipe given. To each pint of chicken allow two-thirds of a pint of celery and one cup of Mayonnaise dressing. When ready to serve mix the celery and chicken and dust lightly with salt, white pepper or cayenne; then mix with them the Mayonnaise. Garnish the salad bowl with crisp lettuce leaves, heap in the salad and serve at once. The bowl may also be garnished with the white, crisp celery tops. One cup of whipped cream may be stirred into the Mayonnaise just before putting it over the chicken. This makes a lighter dressing and removes a little of the oily flavor.
The liquor in which the chicken was boiled may be saved for soup.
A late-Victorian chicken salad in the classic American mould: poached bird, celery, mayonnaise, nothing else. The technique notes matter more than the proportions.
- Cut, never chopThe instruction to cut the meat in clean blocks with a sharp knife rather than shredding or chopping it is the hinge of the dish. Torn or chopped meat sheds fibres that turn the mayonnaise cloudy and pasty; neat dice stay distinct and hold the dressing on their surfaces.
- "Draw and singe a fowl"Drawing means removing the innards and singeing means burning off the remaining pin feathers over a flame. Neither applies to a supermarket bird. "Fowl" here generally means an older, tougher laying bird -- a stewing hen if you can find one, otherwise a large roasting chicken.
- Poaching in very little waterThe near-dry kettle is deliberate: the bird part-steams rather than boils. Keep the liquid at a bare shiver, never a boil, and count on about 1 1/2 hours for a young chicken and up to 3 for a stewing hen. The claim that this makes the dark meat almost as white as the white meat is the book's own.
- Blade of maceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg; a "blade" is one dried piece. About 1/4 teaspoon of ground mace substitutes, though it will cloud the broth.
- Pints of chicken and celeryThese are volume measures of the already-diced meat, not weights. A pint of diced chicken is roughly three-quarters of a pound of picked meat. Two-thirds of a pint of celery is about three stalks, trimmed of leaves and strings.
- Cooking the day beforeSound advice for texture -- cold meat dices cleanly and warm meat will break the mayonnaise. Cool the chicken quickly rather than leaving it out to reach room temperature, then refrigerate it covered, and dress the salad only at the moment of serving.
- The mayonnaiseThe referenced dressing is a raw-yolk emulsion. If you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurised eggs or a commercial mayonnaise as the base.
- YieldAs written this makes a little over a quart of dressed salad, enough for about four as a lunch course or six heaped on lettuce as part of a larger table.
Chicken salad in this form -- cold poached fowl, celery, and a mayonnaise bound with nothing else -- was a standard American company dish from the 1880s through the 1920s. Celery in this period was a prestige winter crop, blanched or forced, often set on the table in tall celery glasses, and the crisp white heart was generally eaten raw. The insistence on white meat only, with the legs demoted to croquettes, reflects a kitchen economy in which one bird was expected to furnish two separate dishes and a pot of stock, and the direction to save the poaching liquor for soup is the same habit at work.