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Chicken Salad Dressing
½ cup rich chicken stock ½ cup vinegar Yolks 5 eggs 1 teaspoon salt ¼ teaspoon pepper Few grains cayenne 1/2 cup thick cream 2 tablespoons mixed mustard 1/3 cup melted butter Reduce stock in which a fowl has been cooked to one-half cupful. Add vinegar, yolks of eggs slightly beaten, mustard, salt, pepper, and cayenne. Cook over boiling water, stirring constantly until mixture thickens. Strain, add cream and melted butter, then cool. 4 "hard-boiled" eggs 4 tablespoons oil 4 tablespoons vinegar 1/2 tablespoon sugar Oil Dressing I ½ teaspoon mustard ½ teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne White 1 egg Force yolks of "hard-boiled" eggs through a strainer, then work, using a silver or wooden spoon, until smooth. Add sugar, mustard, salt, and cayenne, and when well blended add gradually oil and vinegar, stirring and beating until thoroughly mixed; then cut and fold in white of egg beaten until stiff.
A boiled dressing built on reduced fowl stock rather than oil — the older American answer to mayonnaise, and far more stable in a warm room. Read the whole method before starting, since the stock has to be reduced before anything else happens.
- Reduce the stock firstThe listed stock is boiled down to ½ cup before the other ingredients join it. That concentration is the whole point of the dressing; skipping it gives a thin, watery sauce that will not coat chicken.
- The hinge: gentle heatCook the yolk mixture in a bowl set over simmering water, not in direct contact with the pan bottom, and stir without stopping. Direct heat curdles the yolks in seconds; the straining step afterwards is insurance, not a cure.
- How thick is thick"Until mixture thickens" means it coats the back of a spoon and holds a line drawn through it. Pull it off the heat at that point, as it will set further as it cools.
- Mixed mustardThis means dry mustard powder already worked to a paste with water or vinegar, not a jarred condiment. Two tablespoons of prepared Dijon is a reasonable stand-in, though sharper.
- Thick creamPeriod "thick cream" is heavy cream, around 36-40% fat, unwhipped. Add it and the melted butter only after the base is off the heat and strained, or the butter will separate.
- Cayenne and pepper"Few grains" is a pinch, well under 1/8 teaspoon. The pepper measure in the ingredient list has lost its fraction; a quarter teaspoon suits the quantity of dressing.
- Yield and useChill thoroughly before folding into cold cooked chicken, and use within two days as it contains stock, cream and lightly cooked egg.
- The second dressingThe Oil Dressing that follows is a separate, uncooked preparation using sieved hard-boiled yolks as the base. The stiffly beaten egg white is folded in raw, so make it only for immediate serving.
Cooked or "boiled" dressings like this one dominated American salad-making before commercial mayonnaise arrived, and cookbooks of the period give many variants. Using the liquid a fowl was poached in as the acid-and-egg base is thrift and flavour at once: nothing of the bird is wasted, and the gelatin in the reduced stock helps the dressing cling and set as it chills. Chicken salad itself was a fixture of late nineteenth-century luncheons, church suppers and ladies' clubs — cold, sliceable, easy to make in quantity — and a dressing that could sit out on a buffet without breaking in the heat was worth the extra pan.