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Chicken Salad
1 quart cold boiled chicken, cut into small squares 1 pint finely cut celery 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 2 hard boiled eggs 2 cups mayonnaise dressing 6 olives Mix chicken, which should be very tender, with celery, salt and pepper and one egg cut into small pieces, marinate with little French dressing, and let stand in cold place one hour. Serve on lettuce leaves and spread mayonnaise over top. Garnish with olives and remaining egg cut into slices or eighths, or use one tablespoon capers sprinkled over top. Dust with paprika. Fruit salad 1/2 pound Malaga grapes 2 pears 1 grapefruit 1 orange 1 head lettuce Wash, peel; remove seeds from all fruit; cut grapes into halves, pears in lengthwise pieces, grapefruit and orange into sections; allow to stand on ice. Serve on lettuce leaves with French dressing. Alligator pears, cassava melon, or other fruit may be substituted for above variety.
Two salads run together on one page, both built on the same idea: cold ingredients, a plain oil-and-vinegar dressing, and lettuce as the plate. A few of the terms have drifted since.
- What a quart of chicken meansCooked meat measured by volume, not weight: a quart of small dice is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of picked meat, which is what you get off a bird of about 3 1/2 to 4 lb. A pint of celery is 2 cups, about four good stalks.
- French dressing, 1900 senseOil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together, nothing more. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing that took the name later. The recipe never quantifies it; two or three tablespoons is enough to coat the chicken and celery.
- The hinge is the marinating hourBoiled chicken is bland and celery is watery. The hour in the cold with a little vinaigrette is what seasons the meat and firms the celery, and skipping it leaves you with mayonnaise poured over damp poultry. Drain off any liquid that pools before dressing.
- MayonnaiseTwo cups is a generous quantity for this volume of chicken, and it would most likely have been made at home from raw yolks. Use pasteurized eggs if making your own, and keep the finished salad refrigerated; the dish is served cold and never reheated.
- Boiled chickenThe recipe asks only for chicken boiled and cooled. Poach rather than boil hard, and cool the meat in its liquid before dicing, which keeps it moist.
- Alligator pears and cassava melonAlligator pear is avocado. "Cassava melon" is almost certainly casaba, the pale winter melon; cassava is a starchy root and has no place in a fruit salad.
- Malaga grapesLarge seeded table grapes, which is why the instruction says to remove the seeds and halve them. Any seedless green grape works and can simply be halved.
- YieldThe chicken salad serves six to eight as a lunch course; the fruit salad, four to six.
Chicken salad in this form is an American restaurant and church-supper dish, and its defining ingredient is arguably not the chicken but the celery. Blanched celery was a costly, carefully grown vegetable in the nineteenth century, sometimes served upright in cut-glass vases at good tables, and its crunch against soft poached fowl is much of the point of the combination. By the time this book appeared, celery had become cheap enough for the dish to spread widely, and the pairing was well established. Salads dressed in mayonnaise, olives and paprika were fashionable fare of the period.