Chicken Salad
1 cup cold cooked chicken 1 cup chopped celery Mayonnaise dressing Lettuce Stuffed olives Mix the chicken and celery lightly with Mayonnaise dressing; pour into a bowl lined with lettuce leaves; throw a little more dressing over the top and garnish with stuffed olives.
A two-ingredient salad that lives or dies on the quality of the chicken and the dressing. A few notes on proportions and assembly.
- Cut the chicken, don't shred it"Cold cooked chicken" is unspecified in the book; any cold poached or roast meat will do, cut into pieces of roughly the same size as the chopped celery. Shredded meat absorbs dressing unevenly and turns pasty.
- YieldOne cup of chicken and one of celery is a small bowl — two modest servings, or four as part of a larger cold table. Scale up in equal parts.
- Mayonnaise dressingPeriod "mayonnaise dressing" is generally a thick emulsion of yolk and oil rather than a thin pourable dressing. The book gives no quantity; use enough to coat without pooling, and keep the extra "thrown over the top" spoonable rather than runny.
- Raw yolk, if you make your ownPeriod mayonnaise is uncooked egg yolk and oil. If you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised, use pasteurised eggs or a commercial mayonnaise.
- "Mix lightly"The instruction is the hinge. Fold with a fork just until the pieces are coated — stirring breaks the celery down and makes the whole thing weep.
- CeleryUse the inner ribs and strip any strings from the outer ones. Chill the diced celery in ice water for ten minutes and drain well; it crisps up and stops the salad going watery in the bowl.
- Stuffed olivesIn cookery of this period stuffed olives generally means green olives stuffed with pimiento. Sliced crosswise they show the red centre.
- Assemble lateDress within an hour of serving and keep it refrigerated. Salted celery and mayonnaise left standing together separate.
Chicken salad in this form — cold poultry, celery, mayonnaise, a lettuce-lined bowl — was a familiar presence on American luncheon and reception tables through the nineteenth century, and versions of it appear in American cookbooks well before the 1870s. Its rise is sometimes attributed to the arrival of celery as an affordable market vegetable in the later nineteenth century, though this remains a supposition rather than a demonstrated cause. The recipe is often said to reflect a practical habit of the era: a roast fowl was not always eaten at one sitting, and the second appearance of the bird — chilled, diced and dressed — was a common expedient.