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Chicken Salad II
Cut cold boiled fowl or remnants of roast chicken in onehalf inch dice. To two cups add one and one-half cups celery cut in small pieces, and moisten with Cream Dressing II. Mound on a salad dish, cover with dressing, and garnish with capers, thin slices cut from small pickles, and curled celery.
A composed salad rather than a mixed one: the dressing goes on twice, once to moisten and once as a coating, and the garnish is structural. A few of Fannie Farmer's assumptions need translating.
- Fowl versus chicken"Fowl" meant an older laying hen, tough enough to need long simmering but far more flavorful than a young bird. A supermarket chicken poached 45-60 minutes, or the meat pulled from a rotisserie bird, stands in; two cups of dice is roughly 10-12 oz of cooked meat.
- Cream Dressing IIThat is a cooked dressing given elsewhere in the book, thickened with egg and sharpened with vinegar, not whipped cream and not modern bottled dressing. Mayonnaise loosened with a little cream and lemon gives a similar texture and tang if you are not making the original.
- Keep the dice honestHalf-inch cubes of chicken against small-cut celery is the whole point of the texture; shredded meat turns the salad into a paste under the dressing. Cut the chicken while it is cold and firm.
- Celery proportionTwo cups chicken to one and a half cups celery, four parts to three, is a high ratio of celery by modern habit, and it is deliberate: the crunch carries the dressing. Use the inner ribs and hold the leaves for garnish.
- Curled celerySlit short pieces of rib lengthwise several times at one end and drop them into ice water for an hour; the strips fan out. It is a period garnish and takes no skill, only time in the water.
- Dress it lateMoisten just before serving. Celery weeps salt water within an hour or two, and a salad dressed in the morning for evening will sit in a pool.
- Yield and holdingServes four as a lunch dish, six as part of a spread. Cooked poultry salad should stay refrigerated and be eaten the day it is made; it was originally a way to use up Sunday's roast within a day or two, not a keeping dish.
Chicken salad in this form is often associated with late nineteenth-century American restaurants and ladies' luncheons, though the combination was already current in American cookbooks earlier, and its structure — cold cooked meat, celery, a thick cooked dressing, an ornamental garnish — reflects a period when salads were built and presented rather than tossed. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book gives several versions in sequence, this being the plain one that starts from leftovers; the book's whole logic is that a household with cold roast fowl on hand should have a use for it, and the capers and sliced pickles come straight from the storecupboard of preserved sharp things. Celery was still a somewhat genteel vegetable in the 1890s, sold bunched and often served on its own in a tall glass, which is part of why it appears here in such quantity and as decoration.