Home › Pickles-Relishes › Chicken Salad and Dressing
Chicken Salad and Dressing
The white meat of cold boiled or roasted chicken One and one-half as much celery as meat Cut meat and celery into pieces a quarter of an inch long or less. Mix and prepare the following dressing: 4 eggs 1 C sugar 1 C vinegar 1 t mustard 1 t salt 1 T butter Juice one lemon 1 t flour Mix flour and mustard with little water and add to mixture. Put on fire and stir constantly until thick. 1/2 pkg. lemon jello
This is a boiled dressing — a cooked egg-and-vinegar sauce that predates widespread bottled mayonnaise — poured over diced chicken and celery. The recipe assumes you know how to handle a stirred custard, and the jello at the end is doing work the original never explains.
- The hinge: do not let the dressing boilThe hinge: keep the heat gentle -- Eggs in an acid mixture will curdle if pushed too hard, so cook it in a double boiler or a heavy pan over low heat, stirring constantly, and pull it when it coats a spoon. The teaspoon of flour, mixed to a paste with the mustard, is there to help hold the eggs together; even so, a rolling boil risks a grainy sauce. If it does break, straining or a brief blitz with a blender may smooth it out.
- AbbreviationsC is a cup, T a tablespoon, t a teaspoon. Mustard means dry mustard powder, not prepared; flour is plain white flour.
- The jelloThe instruction is bare, but the intent is clear: half a package of lemon gelatin dissolved into the hot dressing so the salad sets lightly rather than running. A modern box is 3 ounces, so half is about 1 1/2 ounces of powder — stir it into the finished dressing while still hot, off the heat, until fully dissolved. Chilled, it should set the dressing at least lightly.
- ProportionsNo weights are given. As a working estimate, the white meat of a roasting chicken will give something like 3 cups diced, which would call for about 4 1/2 cups of celery. Quarter-inch dice is finer than is usual today, and it suits the set dressing, which has to bind the pieces.
- SweetnessA full cup of sugar against a cup of vinegar makes a dressing closer to a sweet-sour cooked salad dressing than to mayonnaise. If that is not what you want, less sugar is possible, though it will read sharper.
- VinegarUse plain cider or white vinegar at 5 percent acidity. Modern specialty vinegars vary in strength and sweetness enough to throw the balance off.
- Chilling and yieldThe dressing makes roughly three cups, ample for the quantity of chicken and celery above. Chill several hours for the gelatin to take hold, and keep it refrigerated; cooked egg dressing on cold poultry is not a dish to leave standing on a buffet.
Boiled dressing of this kind was the standard American salad sauce well into the twentieth century — cheaper and more stable than a hand-beaten mayonnaise, and forgiving of the pantry vinegar and dry mustard every household had. Powdered flavored gelatin became a cheap staple after Jell-O's mass marketing in the early 1900s, and cooks folded it into everything, savory dishes included, because a salad that could be unmolded on a platter traveled to a potluck supper better than one that could not.