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Chicken Salad
Use two parts of cold cooked chicken to one part of celery. Marinate and drain the chicken, add the celery, and mix with mayonnaise or boiled dressing. Arrange the salad in nests of lettuce leaves and put a pim-ola in the centre of each nest.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in early twentieth-century salad books, where the author assumed you already knew the dressings from earlier pages. Two details carry the dish: the marinating step and the ratio.
- "Marinate" means dress with French dressingIn this period marinating a salad meant tossing the cut ingredients in oil and vinegar, salted and peppered, letting them stand a while, then draining off what has not been absorbed. Proportions and timing varied from book to book. It seasons the chicken from within, which mayonnaise alone will not do.
- Drain properlyAny oil and vinegar left clinging will thin the mayonnaise and make the salad weep on the plate. Tip the chicken into a sieve and let it sit a few minutes before dressing.
- Pim-olaA trade name of the era for a green olive stuffed with pimiento — now sold simply as a pimiento-stuffed olive. Nothing else is required.
- Two parts chicken to one part celeryMost likely by volume rather than weight, though the recipe does not say. As an example, about 3 cups diced cooked chicken to 1 1/2 cups celery, cut small enough that no piece needs a second bite; this is a fork salad, not a chopped one.
- Boiled dressingThe period alternative to mayonnaise: a cooked mixture of egg, vinegar, mustard and a little flour or butter, thickened over water and cooled. It is sharper and less oily than mayonnaise.
- The chickenPoached or roasted breast and thigh both work; the recipe asks only for cold cooked chicken, however it was cooked. Cool it fully before cutting, or the dice will shred.
- Keep it coldA mayonnaise-bound chicken salad should be assembled cold and kept refrigerated until served. The recipe itself says nothing about temperature.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; at the example amounts suggested above it would fill roughly four to six lettuce nests as a luncheon course.
Chicken salad in this form — cold poultry, celery, and a bound dressing — was long a fixed point of American genteel entertaining, and by the later nineteenth century it was a familiar sight at gatherings of many kinds. Celery was the crucial partner: cultivated celery had become widely and cheaply available in the late nineteenth century, and its crispness is often said to have been valued as a foil to rich mayonnaise. The instruction to build the salad in "nests of lettuce leaves" with an olive at the centre reflects the era's enthusiasm for individually composed portions rather than a communal bowl, and the appearance of a brand name like Pim-ola in a recipe text shows how quickly commercial packaged goods had worked their way into the domestic repertoire.