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Chicken Salad, No. 4
Cut one cucumber and one bunch of round radishes in thin slices, and add two-thirds a cup of shredded celery. Season with four tablespoonfuls of oil, two tablespoonfuls of vinegar or lemon juice, half a teaspoonful of salt and a dash of paprica.
Put on a bed of shredded lettuce or on heart leaves of lettuce; cover with three cups of chicken cut in cubes and marinated an hour or more with four tablespoonfuls of oil, two tablespoonfuls of lemon juice or vinegar, half a teaspoonful of salt and a dash of white pepper. Mask with mayonnaise.
Arrange some bits of celery, an inch and a half in length and curled on one end, about the salad, with a bit of yolk of egg in the centre of each. Or, instead of the celery and yolk of egg, use sliced radishes (do not remove the red skin), having the slices overlap one another. Finish the top with tuft of lettuce or curled celery and yolk of egg.
A composed, layered salad rather than a tossed one: dressed vegetables underneath, marinated chicken above, mayonnaise over the top. The order of assembly is the recipe.
- The hinge: marinate the chickenCubed cooked chicken sitting an hour in oil, acid and salt is what keeps this from tasting like plain poultry under mayonnaise. Do it first, refrigerated, and drain the cubes before they go on the salad so the mayonnaise does not slide off.
- "Mask with mayonnaise"To mask is to coat the surface smoothly and opaquely, so the chicken beneath is hidden. Use a thick mayonnaise, thinned with a teaspoon of lemon juice only if it will not spread; a runny dressing will pool in the lettuce.
- PapricaAn older spelling of paprika. In books of this period it would most likely have been a mild, sweet paprika, and in a dressing like this it contributes colour as well as flavour.
- Oil and vinegarFour tablespoons oil to two of acid is a 2:1 dressing, sharper than the 3:1 ratio often given for vinaigrette today. The recipe does not specify which oil; olive oil is a plausible reading. Taste and add oil if it bites.
- "Bit of yolk of egg"Hard-cooked yolk, pressed through a sieve into small crumbs or rolled into a tiny ball. Set it in the hollow of each celery curl as a garnish, not mixed in.
- Curled celeryCut celery into 1 1/2-inch lengths, slit one end lengthwise several times, and drop into ice water for 20-30 minutes; the strips curl back on themselves. This works only with the crisp inner ribs.
- Chicken quantity and yieldChicken quantity -- Three cups of cubed cooked chicken is roughly a pound of meat, rather less than a whole small bird will yield. The recipe gives no number of servings.
- Radishes"Round radishes" means the small red globe type. The instruction not to peel them is deliberate: the red rims of the overlapping slices are the whole point of that garnish.
Chicken salad was a fixture of the American ladies' luncheon by the turn of the twentieth century, and cookbooks of the era often printed several numbered versions of it, as this one does. The earlier standard was blunt: chicken and celery, chopped and bound with mayonnaise or a boiled dressing. What marks this variation is the influence of French service on the home table — the salad is built in layers, the dressing is applied as a mask rather than stirred through, and the top is finished with cut garnishes meant to be looked at before being eaten. The use of raw cucumber, radish and lettuce also fits a broader change in supply, as commercial market gardening and rail shipping extended the season for crisp salad vegetables in city households.