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Chicken (or Fowl) Salad
INGREDIENTS for salad for 5 or 6 persons.- The remains of cold roast or boiled chicken, 2 lettuces, a little endive, 1 cucumber, a few slices of boiled beetroot, salad-dressing.
AVERAGE COST, exclusive of the cold fowl, 10d.
Trim neatly the remains of the chicken; wash, dry, and slice the lettuces, and place in the middle of a dish; put the pieces of fowl on the top, and pour the salad-dressing over them. Garnish the edge of the salad with bard-boiled eggs cut in rings, CHICKEN VOL-AU-VENT. sliced cucumber, and boiled beetroot cut in slices. Instead of cutting the eggs in rings, the yolks may be rubbed through a hair sieve, and the whites chopped very finely, and arranged on the salad in small bunches, yellow and white alternately.
This should not be made long before it is wanted for table.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A composed salad of leftovers rather than a dish cooked from scratch, so the work is all in the trimming, the dressing and the timing. Two things in the text are printing artefacts: "bard-boiled" is hard-boiled, and "CHICKEN VOL-AU-VENT" is the running head of the following entry that has strayed into the paragraph.
- Dress at the last minuteThe instruction not to make it long before it is wanted is the hinge of the recipe. Lettuce dressed even twenty minutes ahead collapses, and beetroot bleeds pink through everything it touches. Assemble the leaves and chicken, keep the garnishes separate, and dress as it goes to the table.
- What "salad-dressing" means hereNot bottled dressing and not a vinaigrette. Beeton's salad dressing is built on pounded hard-boiled egg yolk with mustard, vinegar and either oil or cream, thick enough to coat. A good homemade mayonnaise thinned with a spoonful of cream and sharpened with vinegar and mustard is the nearest modern equivalent.
- EndiveIn a British book of this date endive means curly endive or frisée, not the pale Belgian chicory. A handful of frisée, or escarole, gives the intended bitter edge.
- BeetrootPlain boiled beetroot, not the sharply pickled kind sold in jars. Vacuum-packed cooked beetroot works; drain and pat it dry, or the vinegar will run into the dressing.
- Hair sieveA horsehair sieve was the fine mesh of the Victorian kitchen. Any fine metal sieve pushes cooked yolk through just as well, and gives the mimosa-like crumb the recipe wants.
- Quantity of chicken"The remains of" is imprecise by design. For five or six people reckon on about 1 lb / 450 g of picked cooked meat, cut into neat strips rather than shredded, with skin and gristle discarded.
- Cost note10d is ten old pence, a twenty-fourth of a pound sterling. The recipe says the figure excludes the cold fowl, so it covers the salad stuff and the dressing. Beeton gives an average cost for most of her recipes.
- Handling the cold fowlCooked chicken should have been refrigerated promptly and used within a couple of days, and the finished salad should not sit out at room temperature. The Victorian larder assumed cool weather and quick consumption; a modern fridge does the same job better.
Chicken salad in this form belongs to the Victorian cold table: the second life of the Sunday roast, dressed up with garnish so that it read as a dish in its own right rather than as leftovers. Beeton's book is organised around exactly that economy, and the entry sits among a run of recipes for using up cold fowl -- the running head shows chicken vol-au-vent following on. The decorative finish is the period signature: sieved yolk and finely chopped white arranged in alternating bunches, a treatment also used on cold fish and aspic dishes, and one that survives today in the garnish generally called mimosa. Note too that the dressing here is built on hard-boiled egg rather than raw, though Beeton gives mayonnaise recipes elsewhere in the book.