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Chicken Salad
2 cups diced chicken 1 cup diced celery Mayonnaise Lettuce Garnish of celery tops, beets cut into dice, capers, egg-yolks, etc.
Left-over chicken makes a very good salad. To prepare a chicken especially for salad, rub well with salt and pepper, place one small onion and one bay-leaf inside, wrap with a napkin, tie securely and steam for three hours, or until a fork can be easily turned around in the meat. When the chicken is cold, cut the breast with a knife into pieces not too small and sprinkle with French dressing. The dark meat should not be used if a pretty salad is desired. If dark meat is used, cut in smaller cubes than white meat and the white meat will predominate in appearance. Marinate the chicken mixture and let it stand. Make a mayonnaise dressing, stir part of it into the celery, place the latter on a thin layer of lettuce, or else arrange it directly upon the salad-dish and dispose the tips of the celery prettily about the edge. Heap the chicken mixture in the center, pour over it the remainder of the mayonnaise, and garnish with white celery tops, beets cut in dice, capers, cold hard-boiled yolks of eggs that have been pressed through a colander, or any other arrangement that pleases the fancy.
A composed chicken salad from the era when the dish was built up on the platter rather than tossed in a bowl. Most of the work is in the bird; the assembly is presentation.
- Dress the chicken while it is still warmDress the chicken before the mayonnaise -- The hinge here is the French dressing (plain oil-and-vinegar vinaigrette) sprinkled on the cut meat before the mayonnaise goes anywhere near it. The recipe has you cut the breast only once the bird is cold, so dress it then; steamed breast is bland and slightly dry, and the acid and oil soak in. Skip it and no amount of mayonnaise at the end will fix the flavor.
- Three hours of steamingThat timing suggests an older, tougher fowl. A modern 4-to-5-lb roasting chicken is done in about 1 to 1 1/4 hours steamed or gently poached, until a thigh reads 165F. The fork-turning test still works, but three hours will leave supermarket chicken stringy.
- The napkinWrapping and tying the bird in cloth would have helped hold it in shape through the long steaming. Cheesecloth or a clean cotton towel does the same, or simply set the chicken on a rack over an inch of water in a covered pot.
- "Marinate ... and let it stand"Half an hour is plenty, and it belongs in the refrigerator, not on the counter. Diced cooked chicken sitting at room temperature is the classic setting for the picnic-salad problem; keep everything cold and serve it cold.
- MayonnaiseThe book assumes a hand-made mayonnaise, which is raw egg yolk. If you make your own and are serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs. Good jarred mayonnaise thinned with a spoonful of lemon juice is a reasonable substitute.
- Diced beets as garnishCooked beets bleed. Dice them, blot them dry, and set them on at the last moment or the whole platter turns pink.
- Egg yolks through a colanderA fine sieve or the small holes of a box grater gives the fluffy effect later cooks call "mimosa." Cold, fully hard-cooked yolks crumble best.
- YieldTwo cups of chicken with one of celery serves four as a light lunch course, three if it is the whole meal. A 4-lb chicken yields well more than two cups of meat, so plan on using the legs elsewhere -- though the recipe does allow dark meat, cut in smaller cubes so the white predominates.
Chicken salad in this style belongs to the period when a salad was expected to be arranged rather than mixed, and when mayonnaise was made by hand at home. The insistence on white meat only is a purely visual argument, of a piece with the period's fondness for pale, symmetrical food, and it suggests a household with enough chicken to be choosy about which half went into the company dish. The recipe also assumes the salad will usually be made from left-over chicken, and gives directions for cooking a bird specially only as a second case.