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Chicken Salad, No. 2
Prepare the salad as before; dispose in a mound on a bed of lettuce leaves and mask with mayonnaise. By the use of stoned olives, cut in halves, divide the surface into quarters. Fill two opposite sections with whites of eggs chopped fine, a third with capers or olives chopped fine, and the fourth with sifted yolks of eggs. Garnish with lettuce and curled celery.
This is a decorating scheme rather than a new salad: the base is the chicken salad from the preceding entry, and everything here happens after it is on the plate. The work is in the finish, so assemble cold and serve promptly.
- "As before"The base is the preceding chicken salad, which in this period typically meant cold cooked chicken cut in dice with crisp celery, dressed with mayonnaise. Proportions and yield are not given here; follow the earlier entry.
- MaskingTo mask is to coat the mounded salad in a smooth, opaque layer of mayonnaise so no filling shows. It needs a thick mayonnaise; a thin or broken one will slide off the mound and pool on the lettuce.
- Stoned olivesSimply pitted olives. Cut in halves and arranged in two crossing lines, they divide the surface into quadrants.
- Sifted yolksHard-cooked yolks pressed through a fine sieve so they fall as light crumbs. Rubbing them through with the back of a spoon gives a much finer, more even quarter than chopping.
- Curled celeryCut short lengths of celery stalk into narrow fringes at each end, leaving the middle intact, and drop them into ice water for an hour; the strips curl back. A period garnish that still works.
- CapersRinse and drain brined capers well before chopping, or their liquid will bleed into the white mayonnaise surface.
- TemperatureA dressed chicken salad standing at room temperature is a poor idea however handsome it looks. Build it on a chilled platter, refrigerate until the moment it goes to table, and do not let it sit out beyond two hours.
- Raw-egg mayonnaiseMayonnaise of this date was usually made by hand with raw yolks. If you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly, or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs or a commercial mayonnaise.
Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties belongs to the turn-of-the-century vogue for cold composed dishes served at luncheons, card parties and church suppers, when chicken salad was a standard company dish of American entertaining. The technique here—masking a mound in mayonnaise and ruling its surface into quarters with olive halves, then filling each quarter with a different colored garnish—echoes professional French garde-manger practice, in which cold buffet pieces were coated in sauce and decorated geometrically. Hill, who edited the Boston Cooking School Magazine, was working in that decorative idiom in terms a household cook with hard-boiled eggs and a jar of capers could manage. The result says a good deal about the period's priorities: the salad itself is prepared "as before," and the entire recipe is devoted to how it looks on the platter.