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Chicken Salad
Boil 3 or 4 fowls in the stock boiler and when done tender set them away to get cold. 1. Cut all the meat of the fowls into strips, and then across, making dice shapes, and as small as time will allow, but don't chop it. Cut 6 or 8 heads of celery the same way.
Prepare either the mayonaise or the salad dressing made with cooked yolks. Mix with both the chicken and the celery, but seperately, a little eil, vinegar, pepper and salt--just enough to moisten and make them look juicy--then press the chicken into an oval mould such as a melon mould or common jelly mould or a deep dish. The oil, etc., will cause it to preserve a good shape. Turn it out on to a flat meat dish. Spread the thick mayonaise all over and smooth it with a knife, and place the seasoned celery around with a spoon. Decorate the salad with whatever may be convenient, not always alike. A rose cut out of a beet, or a row of them, with parsley or other green, natural flowers, capers, sliced hard-boiled eggs and so forth, or chopped red cabbage sparingly sprinkled over, or cut lemons.
Individual dishes just the same as above, but shaped in individual moulds, or in egg cups can have a cherry scooped out of a cooked beet on top, or a green pickle--ways that are short and speedy, and olives either plain or stoned and stuffed come in good place. 2. It is not essential to have a salad dressing for the above, but does well enough to add more oil and vinegar to the chicken and mince the celery fine. Celery so minced and mixed with oil and vinegar has a buttery appearance and will keep shape when moulded, as it may be to form a border. Garnish with sliced or quartered eggs beside. 3. Cut the chicken small. Prepare one-third as much celery and a similar quantity of green lettuce. Mix all and pour over a thin mayonaise or other dressing in a bowl. Combine thoroughly, and dish up spoonfuls piled a little in flat dishes.
Border of small lettuce leaves, shred lettuce or minced yolks of eggs. This should not be pasty, as thick dressing would make it. Veal salad may be made like chicken. It is best to call it veal salad and make it as good as chicken if possible.
This is written for a hotel kitchen turning out a buffet centerpiece, so the quantities are banquet scale and the shaping matters as much as the seasoning. Scale it down before you start.
- Scale and yieldThree or four fowls with 6 to 8 bunches of celery is banquet quantity; the recipe gives no yield, but it is several dozen servings. One 4 lb chicken and two bunches of celery keeps the same proportion and makes the moulding manageable.
- FowlsA "fowl" here is a mature laying hen, tougher and far more flavorful than a supermarket broiler, which is why it goes into the stock boiler until tender rather than being roasted. A whole chicken poached gently until the thigh reaches 165F is the practical substitute; the poaching liquid is worth keeping.
- Heads of celeryA head means a whole bunch, not a rib. Older celery was blanched pale and milder than modern green Pascal, so taste as you go and lean on the paler inner ribs.
- "Eil"A typesetter's slip for oil. The chicken and celery are each dressed separately with oil, vinegar, pepper and salt before the mayonnaise goes on.
- Cool it properly"Set them away to get cold" meant a cold larder. Break the birds down and refrigerate the meat within two hours; a whole hot fowl left on a counter overnight sits in the danger zone for hours.
- The dressing choiceThe recipe offers mayonnaise or a dressing made with cooked yolks. The cooked-yolk version was the safer keeping dressing then and still is; if you make raw mayonnaise for a salad that will sit out on a platter, use pasteurized eggs and keep the dish chilled.
- The hinge is the mouldThe oil and vinegar are what let the diced meat hold an unmoulded shape, so the chicken must be evenly moistened and pressed firmly into the mould, then chilled until set before turning out. Coat it with mayonnaise thick enough to spread with a knife, not pourable.
- Method 3 is the one most cooks wantMethod 3 is the simplest version -- chicken, one-third as much celery and a similar quantity of lettuce, tossed with a thin dressing and piled in flat dishes. Dress it at the last minute; the lettuce collapses within the hour.
- Beet garnishRoasted or boiled beets carved into roses stain everything they touch. Cut them last, blot them dry, and set them on top rather than mixing them in unless you want a pink salad.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of trade manuals Jessup Whitehead wrote in the 1880s and 90s for cooks in American hotels, restaurants and railroad dining rooms, which explains the stock boiler, the melon moulds and the assumption that you are cutting up four birds at once. Chicken salad had become a fixture of the American cold table by then, and its standing pairing with celery is generally traced to the mid-nineteenth century, when field-grown celery was still a somewhat costly delicacy and a mark of a genteel table. What dates the recipe most is the moulding: in this period a salad could be built and decorated as a set piece, glossed with thick mayonnaise and finished with beet roses, capers and sliced egg. The closing note is characteristic of the trade literature as well, telling the cook to serve veal honestly under its own name and make it as good as chicken rather than passing it off as the more expensive bird.