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Veal Salad
This may be made precisely the same as chicken salad, using cold boiled veal instead of chicken.
A one-line variation that assumes you already have the chicken salad recipe in hand: cold cooked meat, crisp celery, boiled or mayonnaise dressing. The substitution works, but veal behaves differently from chicken and needs a little help.
- What "cold boiled veal" meansA cut simmered gently in salted water until tender, then cooled in its own liquid so it does not dry out. Shoulder or a boneless leg roast works; modern guidance is to cook to 145F internal and let it rest, then chill before cutting. Cooling in the broth helps keep the meat from turning chalky.
- Proportions, since none are givenMany period chicken salad recipes use roughly equal volumes of diced meat and diced celery, though some use twice as much meat as celery. As a working starting point, about 2 cups cooked veal, 2 cups celery and 3/4 cup dressing serves four to six.
- Cut with a knife, not a forkVeal is blander than chicken and pulls apart raggedly rather than into neat pieces. Dice it in clean half-inch cubes so the salad keeps texture against the celery.
- Season harder than you would for chickenVeal carries very little of its own flavor once cold. Salt, a good grind of pepper, lemon juice or a spoonful of the pickling vinegar from capers, and mustard in the dressing all earn their place here.
- The dressingThe chicken salad formula being referred to would call for either a mayonnaise or a cooked boiled dressing thickened with egg and flour and sharpened with vinegar. Both appear in cookbooks of this type, and either works here.
- Chilling and holdingDress the salad shortly before serving and keep it refrigerated. Cooked meat in a mayonnaise dressing at room temperature is the classic buffet problem; two hours out is the outside limit.
- ServingPeriod chicken salad recipes often mound the salad on crisp lettuce leaves and garnish with hard-boiled egg, capers or olives. It also fills sandwiches well.
Chicken salad was a fixture of the American late-nineteenth-century table, and cookbooks of the era often followed it with a run of substitutions: veal, sweetbreads, lobster, cold turkey. Veal was a natural stand-in because it is pale, mild and fine-textured, and it was generally among the cheaper meats. Recipes like this one also fit the economics of a household that boiled a large joint of meat: the hot dinner came off the first day, and the cold remainder reappeared as salad, croquettes or hash. The terse cross-reference is itself characteristic of the genre, where a compiler assumed the reader had already met the master formula and needed only to be told what could be swapped into it.