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Chicken Salad with Almonds--Ten People
1 good hen. 1/2 lb. almonds, blanched. 3 stalks celery. Steam or cook chicken until tender. When ready to take from the fire have one quart or more stock. Cut chicken and celery same size. Cut almonds lengthwise, each into two or three pieces. Mix all lightly together and add enough cooked dressing to season well. Serve on lettuce with mayonnaise or same kind of dressing with whipped cream.
A straightforward composed salad, but two of its terms have shifted meaning since 1920: the bird and the dressing.
- "1 good hen"This means a mature stewing hen, an old laying bird with firm flesh and a great deal of flavour; such birds typically ran heavier than a young broiler. A supermarket roaster or a 4-5 lb whole chicken substitutes fine, and will likely be tender in well under half the time an old stewing hen wants — check it rather than trusting a clock.
- "3 stalks celery"Genuinely ambiguous. In cookbooks of this period "stalk" often meant the whole head, not the single rib, and three ribs would be lost in a salad serving ten. Read it as two to three heads' worth of trimmed inner ribs, roughly 3 to 4 cups diced.
- Cooked dressingNot mayonnaise. A boiled dressing is a cooked custard of egg yolk, flour or cornstarch, mustard, vinegar and milk or stock, thickened over water and cooled — tangier and less rich than mayonnaise, and it holds up in a salad that sits.
- The quart of stockThe recipe tells you to have it ready and then never spends it. Presumably the cooking liquid from the hen was meant to be kept: a few spoonfuls will moisten the diced chicken as it cools so it does not turn dry and cottony, and the rest is worth saving for soup. Let the chicken cool in the broth if you can.
- Cut same sizeThe instruction that decides whether this works. Chicken and celery in matching dice — half an inch or so is a practical choice — means every forkful gets both; ragged shredded chicken makes a heavy, wet salad.
- AlmondsBlanched means skinned — pour boiling water over, stand two minutes, slip the skins off. Split lengthwise rather than chopped, and fold them in at the last moment; sitting in dressing softens them within the hour.
- Cooling and holdingCool the chicken quickly, spread out rather than in a mass, and dress it cold. A dressed chicken salad for ten should go straight to the refrigerator and stay under 40F until served.
- Dressing with whipped creamThe final option is boiled dressing or mayonnaise lightened with unsweetened whipped cream, folded in just before serving; the recipe gives no proportion. It softens the acidity and was a fashionable finish for fruit and chicken salads of the period; it separates if made far ahead.
- YieldTen as a luncheon course on lettuce. A large stewing hen should give somewhere in the region of 5 to 7 cups of diced meat.
Mary A. Wilson wrote for Philadelphia households in the years around the First World War, and her books carry the marks of that moment: stretch the protein, waste no stock, feed a crowd from one bird. Chicken salad itself was already an American fixture by then — a staple of church suppers, ladies' luncheons and hotel menus through the late nineteenth century, where its combination of celery and cold fowl was so standard that cookbooks often gave no proportions at all. The almonds and the whipped-cream dressing are the period's idea of luxury applied to a thrifty base, and the boiled dressing is the older technique surviving alongside mayonnaise, which only became a commercial product on American shelves in the 1910s. Specifying a hen rather than simply a chicken is telling: a bird that had finished laying was the cheap one, and its flavour was considered the better of the two.