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Black Walnut Salad
2 TEASPOONS BUTTER SALT 1/2 CUP BLACK WALNUT MEATS I 11/2 CUPS COLD CHICKEN 3/4 CUP DICED CELERY FRENCH DRESSING LETTUCE LEAVES In butter and a very little salt slowly heat walnut meats. Let cool, then break in smaller pieces and mix with chicken meat, celery and dressing, and serve on lettuce.
The ordinary English or store walnuts would do, of course, but wild black all-American walnuts have that individual tang. They're tastier and more buttery, so once you've had this wild woods salad on a picnic or sleigh ride you'll never go back to the kind made with common walnuts that are little better than wooden nutmegs in comparison to the real thing.
A cold chicken salad built around toasted black walnuts, meant to be assembled at home and carried out. The whole dish depends on the nuts, so treat that step as the one that matters.
- QuantitiesRead the list as 2 teaspoons butter, ½ cup black walnut meats, 1½ cups cold cooked chicken, ¾ cup diced celery, French dressing and salt to taste. Lettuce leaves are for serving, not mixing.
- Toasting the nuts"Slowly heat" means gentle toasting in the butter over low heat, a few minutes, until fragrant. Black walnuts have high oil content and scorch fast; once they smell sharp rather than sweet they are past saving.
- Cool before mixingWarm nuts wilt the celery and thin the dressing. Spread them on a plate to cool fully, then break them up so the pieces stay in coarse fragments rather than turning to paste.
- Black walnutsJuglans nigra, not the English walnut of the grocery aisle. The shells are notoriously hard, and the flavor is far more resinous and assertive. The recipe allows English walnuts as a substitute.
- French dressingIn this period that means a simple oil-and-vinegar vinaigrette, roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar with salt and pepper, not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today. Start with about 3 tablespoons and add more only if the salad looks dry.
- The chickenCold poached or roasted chicken, cut in dice or pulled into bite-size pieces.
- Yield and holdingEnough for three to four servings as a light lunch. If it is going on a picnic, keep it cold and dress it no more than a couple of hours ahead, or the celery goes limp.
Black walnuts were a gathered crop rather than a bought one across much of the eastern and central United States, hulled in the fall and cracked through the winter, and cookbooks of the outdoor and camp genre leaned on them as a point of local pride. The dish is a version of the chicken-and-celery salad long established in American cookery; swapping in a wild nut gave a standard recipe a regional identity. The writer's dig at "wooden nutmegs" borrows a nineteenth-century American insult for a worthless counterfeit, said to come from the trade in fake nutmegs whittled out of wood.