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Chrysanthemum Salad for Fall
12 oranges. 1 chicken. 3 stalks celery. 1 lb. green grapes. 1/2 lb. nuts if you wish.
Make chicken salad with celery and nuts (pecans). Cut orange peel in quarters to bottom without entirely removing them. With scissors cut in strips as small as can be cut. Divide the orange in sections, making a double chrysanthemum. Fill in center with salad, putting grapes on top. Serve with heavy garnish of lettuce. Beautiful when yellow chrysanthemums are used in decorations.
A carved-orange presentation from the era when a salad was judged first by its looks. The eating part is a straightforward chicken salad; the work is all in the knife and scissors.
- The hinge: cut the peel, not the fleshScore the peel into quarters down to the base without severing it, then shred each quarter into narrow strips with scissors so they curl outward like petals. Cut into the fruit and the whole cup collapses. Chilling the oranges firms the peel and makes the strips hold their shape.
- "3 stalks celery"In older usage a "stalk" of celery could mean the whole head rather than a single rib, so the quantity is genuinely uncertain; three whole heads would swamp a single chicken. Read it as a few ribs and taste as you go -- roughly two to three cups of diced celery suits a bird this size.
- The chickenA stewing fowl of the period ran 4 to 5 lb and was simmered until tender, yielding roughly 4 cups of picked meat. A 4 lb roasting chicken, poached and cooled in its broth, gives the same amount with better texture.
- No dressing is namedMrs. Wilson assumes her reader knows chicken salad means mayonnaise or a cooked boiled dressing. Figure about a cup, added just before assembly so the salad does not weep into the orange cups.
- Green grapesMany green table grapes of the period had seeds and would have been halved and pipped, though seedless varieties were already available. Modern seedless green grapes need only halving.
- NutsPecans, though the recipe makes them optional ("if you wish"). Half a pound is generous for this quantity. Toast them lightly and add at the last minute or they go soft in the dressing.
- Yield and timingTwelve oranges means twelve servings, one per person, as a luncheon course. The oranges can be carved several hours ahead and refrigerated covered with a damp cloth; fill them no more than half an hour before serving.
- ServingSet each orange on a bed of lettuce leaves on an individual plate. The scored peel is decoration only and is not eaten.
Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal and published Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book in 1920, at the high tide of the decorative American salad. Fruit shells, aspic moulds and vegetables cut into flowers filled the salad chapters of household books over roughly the four decades either side of 1900, in what is often said to have been a period when a hostess with a servant or two could afford the labour and a luncheon table was expected to look composed. The chrysanthemum was the natural model: it reached Europe from China in the late eighteenth century, with Japanese varieties following in the mid-nineteenth, and it had become the standard autumn cut flower by 1900, when chrysanthemum shows were fixtures of the American fall social calendar. Mrs. Wilson's closing note about yellow chrysanthemums in the decorations is the giveaway that this dish belongs to the table setting as much as to the menu: the salad is meant to echo the centerpiece.