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English Walnut and Chicken Salad
Twenty-four English walnuts, onion, parsley, chicken liquor, celery, cold cooked chicken, mayonnaise dressing.
Make a chicken salad. Parboil the English walnuts long enough to remove the skins. In boiling the nuts add a slice of onion, a sprig of parsley, and a little of the chicken liquor; then drain, remove the brown skins. Mix them with the celery and chicken. Cover with a mayonnaise dressing.
A short recipe that assumes you already know how to build a chicken salad; the only real instruction is the treatment of the nuts.
- The hinge: skinning the walnutsThe brown skin on a walnut carries most of its bitterness, and this recipe exists to get rid of it. Two to three minutes in simmering water is enough for the skins to slip under a thumbnail or a rub with a rough towel; longer and the kernels turn soft and waterlogged.
- "English walnuts"The ordinary Juglans regia, sold today simply as walnuts. The name distinguished them from American black walnuts, which are stronger, oilier and would overwhelm the chicken.
- Twenty-four walnutsWhole nuts in the shell, yielding roughly a cup of halves, about 4 ounces shelled. Buying shelled halves is the sensible substitution.
- Chicken liquorThe broth left from poaching the chicken. Along with the onion slice and parsley it lends the nuts some savour as they blanch, though the recipe itself gives skin removal as the reason for the parboiling; plain water would give you clean nuts and nothing else.
- "Make a chicken salad"Shorthand for cold cooked chicken cut up, celery in roughly similar quantity, and enough dressing to bind. The recipe gives no proportions, and period books vary. Cutting the chicken by hand rather than shredding it suits a salad of this kind.
- The mayonnaiseContemporary mayonnaise dressing was made to order with raw yolks and oil. If you make your own, use pasteurized eggs and keep the finished salad refrigerated; the dish is never cooked after the dressing goes on.
- Yield and servingPerhaps four as a luncheon dish, though the recipe gives no quantity of chicken. Salads of this period were often served on lettuce leaves or in a hollowed tomato, sometimes with a few reserved walnut halves set on top.
Chicken salad bound with mayonnaise was one of the defining American luncheon dishes of the late nineteenth century, and by 1900 the addition of nuts and fruit had become a standard way of ringing changes on it. The insistence on "English" walnuts is a period marker in itself. American cooks had native black walnuts in quantity, and the name of the Persian nut is conventionally tied to English merchant shipping, though the origin is not settled; either way it distinguished the milder, sweeter kernel a delicate salad required, and the parboiling step here shows how seriously the bitterness of the skin was taken before commercially shelled and graded nuts were common.