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Chicken Salad
Boil chicken until it is tender and cut in small pieces; cut also whites of a dozen hard boiled eggs; add chopped cabbage and celery in equal quantities; pound yolks of eggs fine and add 2 tablespoons of sugar and butter, 1 teaspoon of mustard with pepper and salt to taste. Finally, add half a teacup of good vinegar. Mix thoroughly. NOTE-Veal, boiled tender, may be used instead of all chicken meat.
This is a boiled-fowl salad with a cooked-yolk dressing, from the era before jarred mayonnaise. The dressing is the part that needs interpretation, since the original assumes you know what consistency you are after.
- Quantities and yieldA dozen eggs and an unspecified quantity of chicken points to a large gathering dish; the recipe gives no bird size or yield, so figure a whole boiled fowl picked and cut small, with roughly equal volumes of chopped cabbage and celery. Halve everything for a family-sized bowl.
- Half a teacup of vinegarA period teacup is usually reckoned at around 6 fl oz, which would make half of it roughly 3 fl oz. Add it in stages and taste; cider vinegar suits this better than sharp white distilled vinegar.
- The dressing is emulsion-freeThere is no oil and no egg-white-thickened base here. The mashed yolks, softened butter, sugar and mustard make a thick paste that the vinegar loosens into a coating dressing. Work the butter in while it is at room temperature or it will stay in flecks.
- MustardRead this as dry mustard powder, not prepared mustard from a jar. One teaspoon of powder is assertive; let the mixed dressing sit ten minutes before judging the heat, as dry mustard blooms.
- Boiling the chicken"Until tender" means gently poached, not hard-boiled: a bare simmer for about an hour for a whole bird, until the thigh reads 175F. A rolling boil shreds the breast and leaves it dry. Cool the meat in its own broth before cutting for better flavour and texture.
- Dice size and drainageCut chicken, egg whites, cabbage and celery to a similar small dice so the dressing distributes. Salt the cabbage lightly and drain it if you are making the salad ahead, or its water will thin the dressing in the bowl.
- The veal substitutionThe note reflects veal's ordinariness at the time. Cold boiled pork shoulder or turkey breast works the same way if veal is inconvenient or expensive.
- Keeping itDress it no more than a couple of hours before serving and hold it refrigerated. A cooked-yolk dressing has no preservative advantage over any other, and this is exactly the kind of dish that used to sit out on a summer table too long.
Chicken salad was a fixture of American church suppers, ladies' luncheons and railroad dining cars through the second half of the nineteenth century, and it often meant boiled fowl in a vinegar-and-mustard dressing, though home-made oil-and-yolk mayonnaise dressings appear in plenty of nineteenth-century recipes too: commercial mayonnaise did not reach American grocers in quantity until the 1910s, so cooks built dressings themselves, on pounded hard-boiled yolks, butter and vinegar, as here. The equal parts of chopped cabbage and celery tell you something about household economy - celery was the prestige ingredient, expensive and seasonal, and cabbage stretched it while keeping the crunch. The veal alternative at the end was practical advice rather than a compromise; cold boiled veal was cheap, mild and widely eaten, and it turns up in the same role in dozens of period salad and croquette recipes. Books of this kind favoured exactly this sort of dish: made ahead, served cold, and scalable to whatever crowd showed up.