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Boiled Dressing for Chicken Salad
INGREDIENTS. 1/2 a cup of chicken stock, 1/2 a teaspoonful of paprica. well reduced. ½ a cup of vinegar.
Yolks of 5 eggs. ½ a cup of oil. ¼ a cup of mixed mustard.
1 teaspoonful of salt. 1/2 a cup of thick, sweet cream.
Method.-Simmer the liquor in which a fowl has been cooked, until it is well reduced. Put the stock, vinegar and mustard into a double boiler, and add the salt and pepper. Beat the yolks of the eggs and add carefully to the hot mixture, cooking in the same manner as a boiled custard.
When cold and ready to serve, beat in with a whisk the oil, and then fold in the cream, beaten stiff with a Dover egg-beater. Melted butter, added before the dressing is cold, may be substituted for the oil.
A cooked egg-and-stock dressing of the type that preceded mayonnaise in American salad cookery, thickened like a custard and enriched at the end with oil and whipped cream. The ingredient column has suffered in setting, so read the quantities against the method.
- Quantities as best they can be readThe list appears to intend about 1/2 cup chicken stock (reduced), 1/2 cup vinegar, 1/4 cup prepared mustard, 5 egg yolks, 1/2 cup oil, 1/2 cup thick cream, 1 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon paprika. The vinegar and mustard figures are the doubtful ones; start with less vinegar and add to taste, since a full cup against half a cup of stock would be punishing.
- The hinge: custard heatYolks curdle above roughly 180F. Temper them with a ladle of the hot liquid first, return everything to the double boiler, and stir until the mixture coats the spoon at about 170-175F. A double boiler is not optional here; direct heat will scramble it.
- Well reduced stockSimmer the fowl liquor until it is concentrated and faintly sticky, and cool it before measuring so the salt is not overshot. Reducing about 1 1/2 cups down to 1/2 cup is the right order of magnitude.
- Mixed mustardThis means mustard powder already made into a paste with water or vinegar, not dry powder and not a sweetened modern condiment. A plain English-style prepared mustard suits it.
- Paprica and pepperPaprika is the seasoning in the ingredient list; the method's reference to pepper is loose usage. Use a sweet paprika.
- Adding the oilThe oil goes in cold, whisked in a little at a time so it emulsifies into the set custard rather than pooling. Butter, if used instead, must go in while the base is still warm or it will seize into flecks.
- Dover egg-beaterA hand-cranked rotary beater. Whip the cream to soft-stiff peaks with a whisk or mixer and fold it in at the last minute, or the dressing will slacken as it stands.
- Yield and keepingMakes something over two cups, enough to dress a chicken salad for a tableful. Dress the salad only just before serving, and refrigerate the base; with stock and eggs in it, treat it as a two-day dressing at most.
Boiled dressings belong to the era before bottled mayonnaise, when a cook needed a salad sauce that could be stretched with whatever was at hand. Using the reduced liquor from the poached fowl as the acid-and-liquid base is thrift and flavour in one move: the same bird supplied the salad and its sauce. Such recipes came out of the Boston Cooking School world, where chicken salad was a fixture of luncheons and church suppers, and where a cooked base enriched with oil and whipped cream sits alongside the oil-emulsion dressings that would later dominate. The Dover beater named at the end was a standard American rotary egg-beater of the period, common enough that its brand name came to stand for the tool.