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Chicken Salad
One pint each of cold boiled or roasted chicken and celery, or half as much celery as chicken, French dressing, mayonnaise dressing, lettuce, whites of four hard boiled eggs.
Cut the chicken into dice. Scrape, wash, and cut the celery in dice. Mix and macerate with a French dressing, and keep on ice until ready to serve. Mix part of the mayonnaise dressing with the chicken; arrange the salad in a dish, and pour the remainder of the dressing over it, and garnish with lettuce or celery leaves around the chicken. On top of the lettuce place the whites of the eggs, cut into rings, and lay so as to form a chain.
A straightforward turn-of-the-century chicken salad, built in two stages: the meat and celery are first marinated in vinaigrette, then bound with mayonnaise at the last moment. That two-dressing method is the whole point of the recipe and is worth keeping.
- Marinate first, bind laterThe French dressing is not a garnish; it seasons the chicken and celery from the inside while they chill. Give it at least an hour, then drain off any pooled liquid before adding mayonnaise, or the finished salad will slacken and weep.
- What a pint means hereA pint is a volume measure of the diced meat, not a weight — roughly 2 cups, or about 10-12 oz of cooked chicken off the bone. That is roughly the meat from a large breast and a thigh.
- French dressingIn this period the term means a plain vinaigrette of oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, usually about three parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today.
- Celery in dice"Scrape" refers to running a knife down the outer ribs to remove the tough strings, which older, coarser celery needed more than modern stalks do. Cut the dice the same size as the chicken so the salad forks up evenly.
- Mayonnaise and raw yolkA period mayonnaise is made with raw egg yolk. If you make your own, use pasteurised eggs or a good commercial mayonnaise, particularly if the salad will sit out on a buffet.
- Keep it cold"Keep on ice" was literal in an icebox kitchen. Cooked chicken dressed with mayonnaise should not sit above refrigerator temperature for more than two hours; assemble the garnish just before it goes to the table.
- The egg-white chainSlice the hard-boiled whites crosswise into rings, then lay them overlapping in a linked circle around the mound. The recipe says nothing about the four leftover yolks; they can be pressed through a sieve and scattered over the top, or worked into the mayonnaise.
- YieldAbout a quart of dressed salad — four generous plates as a luncheon dish, six or eight as part of a larger cold table.
Chicken salad in this form — cold poultry and celery under mayonnaise — was a fixture of American luncheon, church supper and dining-car menus through the later nineteenth century, and cookbooks of the period print it alongside lobster and shrimp salad, all built on the same celery-and-mayonnaise frame. Celery was a fashionable salad vegetable of the late nineteenth century, often served on its own cut glass dish. The elaborate garnish is characteristic of the era's cold table: a salad was expected to be constructed and looked at, and books of this kind devote as much attention to the chain of egg-white rings and the fringe of lettuce as to the seasoning. Recipes assuming "cold boiled or roasted chicken" also suggest a household that cooked whole birds and expected the remains to reappear the next day in a different guise.