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Turkey-and-Chestnut Salad
Prepare the chestnuts as previously directed, using twice as much turkey meat, light or dark, cut into small cubes. Serve with lettuce and French, boiled or mayonnaise dressing, as desired.
Marinate and drain the meat before adding the nuts.
A postscript recipe of the kind common in turn-of-the-century salad books: it assumes you have just read the chestnut salad above it and are looking for a way to use Thanksgiving leftovers. A few gaps need filling.
- "Prepare the chestnuts as previously directed"The earlier recipe is not reproduced here, but it will have meant shelling and skinning the nuts, boiling them until just tender, and cooling them before cutting. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts are a reasonable substitute and need no boiling; drain and halve or quarter them.
- The proportionTwice as much turkey as chestnuts; the recipe does not say whether by weight or measure, and the chestnut quantity comes from the earlier recipe. Working by volume, about 2 cups of diced cooked turkey to 1 cup of chestnut pieces makes roughly four servings.
- Marinate and drain firstThe recipe insists on it but does not say in what or for how long. French dressing (oil, vinegar, salt, pepper) for 20-30 minutes, chilled, then drained of what has not been absorbed, works well. Cold roast poultry is bland and dry; the acid and oil correct both. The nuts presumably go in afterward because they are floury and would break up if steeped.
- Boiled dressingA cooked dressing thickened with egg yolk and a little flour, sharpened with vinegar and mustard, and used cold. It is tangier and lighter than mayonnaise, and it appears alongside mayonnaise as a standard alternative in salad books of this kind.
- Cut size"small cubes" is not defined; about half an inch suits the dish. Larger pieces of cold turkey read as leftovers on a plate; smaller ones let the dressing coat every surface.
- ServingServe in lettuce cups or on a bed of leaves, cold, the day it is dressed. Chestnuts turn pasty after a night in dressing.
- Light or dark meatThe recipe permits either, but dark meat holds moisture better and stands up to the marinade; a mix gives the best texture.
Turkey-and-chestnut salad is a leftovers dish standing in the shadow of a roast: chestnuts were one common stuffing and garnish for holiday turkey, so a cook working through the carcass on the third day already had cooked chestnuts in the larder. Books like this one made a point of showing how cold cooked meat could be turned into something presentable at the luncheon table rather than merely eaten cold with pickles. The native American chestnut was still cheap and abundant in the American market at the time; the blight that destroyed it in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the resulting reliance on imported European chestnuts, would make the nut a seasonal luxury rather than a pantry staple.