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Chicken-Salad Sandwiches
(Chou-paste boxes.) (See cut facing page 126.) Bake chou paste in long, slender shapes, like éclairs, but narrower and shorter; when cold split apart on the ends and one side and fill with chicken salad. Put the top back in place, after inserting a celery plume at each end. Garnish the serving-dish with celery leaves and pim-olas or olives. Serve other salads in the same way.
This is an assembly recipe: the book assumes you already have choux paste and chicken salad in hand and only tells you what shape to pipe and how to dress the plate. The points below fill in what it leaves unsaid.
- Chou pasteChou (choux) paste is the flour-butter-water-egg batter of éclairs and cream puffs, cooked on the stove and beaten with eggs before piping. Any standard pâte à choux formula works; a batch using 1 cup flour, 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup water and 4 eggs gives roughly 24 small shells.
- OvenBake the piped fingers at 425F for about 10 minutes to force the steam and lift them, then drop to 350F for another 15-20 minutes until they are dry, hollow and deeply browned. Pale shells collapse as they cool.
- Shape and sizePipe them 2 to 2 1/2 inches long and no thicker than a finger, using a plain half-inch tip. The book wants a sandwich-sized bite, not a dessert éclair.
- Dry them outPierce each shell as it leaves the oven and let it sit in the turned-off oven a few minutes so the interior steam escapes. A damp shell goes limp within minutes of being filled.
- Fill at the last momentMayonnaise-dressed chicken salad softens the pastry quickly. Split and fill no more than half an hour before serving, and keep the filled boxes refrigerated until they go to the table.
- Celery plumeThe leafy top of an inner celery stalk, inserted so it stands out of each end like a feather. Use the pale yellow-green center leaves, not the coarse dark outer ones.
- Pim-olasPimola was a trade name for green olives stuffed with sweet red pimiento, sold around the turn of the century as a novelty. Ordinary pimiento-stuffed olives are the same thing.
- YieldFigure two to three filled boxes per person as a luncheon or tea course, and about 3 cups of chicken salad for 24 small shells.
Choux paste turns up as a savory vessel all through turn-of-the-century American entertaining books, and this one -- Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing Dish Dainties, published in Boston in 1899 and reprinted several times thereafter -- is squarely in that tradition. The "sandwich" section of such books stretches the word well past bread: rolled sandwiches, wafers, lettuce leaves and pastry cases all count, because what mattered was a portion that could be eaten standing up at a reception or handed round at a ladies' luncheon without a knife. Hill directed the Boston Cooking School Magazine and wrote for an audience of hostesses who cared as much about how a dish looked on the platter as how it tasted, which is why a third of these directions concerns celery plumes and olive garnishes rather than cooking. The chicken salad itself was the era's standard company dish -- cold fowl, celery and mayonnaise -- and putting it in a pastry shell dressed it up for the table.