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Chicken-and-Fresh-Mushroom Salad
Peel mushroom caps, break in pieces, and sauté in melted butter five or six minutes with a slice of onion; add chicken liquor or hot water and let simmer until tender. Remove from the liquor, cover, and set aside to cool. Add the liquor and the peelings and stalks of the mushrooms to the liquid in which the chicken is to be cooked. Use the chicken and mushrooms with celery or lettuce in any recipe for chicken salad.
A component recipe rather than a finished salad: it prepares mushrooms and flavours the chicken's cooking liquid, then sends you off to any chicken salad formula. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- Don't peel modern mushroomsThe instruction to peel caps belongs to an era of field-gathered or coarsely grown mushrooms with tough, gritty skins. Cultivated white and cremini mushrooms need only a wipe with a damp cloth; peeling them throws away flavour and texture.
- Stalks and trimmings are still worth keepingThe best idea here survives intact: the trimmings go into the chicken's poaching liquid. Stalks hold as much savour as the caps, and the resulting broth is what ties the salad together.
- "Chicken liquor"Simply the broth from poaching the chicken, or its canned equivalent. If you are cooking the bird after the mushrooms, use water or a light stock for the mushrooms and add their liquid to the pot when the chicken goes in.
- Sauté timingSaut imes minutes over moderate heat is enough to drive off water and start browning. The recipe gives no time for the subsequent simmer "until tender" only a few minutes will usually do for cultivated mushrooms; long stewing turns them slack and grey.
- Cool covered, and use the juicesCovering while cooling keeps them from drying and collects the liquid they give back. Spoon that into the dressing rather than draining it away.
- Proportion and yieldThe original gives no quantities. For a salad serving four, figure on about 2 cups diced cooked chicken to 8 oz mushrooms, with an equal volume of celery or a bed of lettuce.
- DressingDressing salad of the period would have been finished with boiled dressing or mayonnaise. A mayonnaise loosened with a spoonful of the mushroom-chicken broth suits this version particularly well.
Fresh mushrooms were less of an everyday item in American home cooking than their dried, canned, or bottled forms ushroom catsup among them d recipes that specify fresh in the title may well be drawing attention to that. The peeling instruction reflects a period when mushrooms often arrived with skins worth removing. Chicken salad was by then a fixture of American luncheons, church suppers and chafing-dish entertaining, and the era's cookbooks devoted long stretches to variations on it. The thrift is characteristic: nothing is discarded, and the peelings and stalks are turned back into the chicken's cooking water so that the whole dish tastes of mushroom rather than just carrying pieces of it.