Nile Salad
Cut cold boiled or roasted chicken in cubes (there should be one and one-half cups). Put one-half cup English walnut meats in pan, sprinkle sparingly with salt, and add threefourths tablespoon butter. Cook in a slow oven until thoroughly heated, stirring occasionally; remove from oven and break in pieces.
Mix chicken and nuts and marinate with French Dressing. Add three-fourths cup celery cut in small pieces. Arrange on a bed of lettuce, and mask with Ravigôte Mayonnaise (see p. 344).
A composed chicken salad from the era when cooks named plates for faraway places. Nothing here is difficult, but three of the instructions assume knowledge the book expected you to have from elsewhere in its pages.
- Slow ovenTake it as somewhere around 250-300F. The walnuts want roughly 10 to 15 minutes at that heat, stirred once or twice, until they smell toasted and the butter has soaked in. They will crisp further as they cool, so pull them before they darken.
- MaskTo mask is to coat the assembled salad with the dressing so the surface is covered, not to toss it through. Spoon the mayonnaise over the mounded chicken and let it settle.
- French DressingIn this book that means a plain vinaigrette of oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, closer to two parts oil to one of vinegar than the modern three. The brief marinade seasons the chicken before the heavier mayonnaise goes on; a short rest is enough.
- Ravigote MayonnaiseMayonnaise tinted and flavoured with a purée of green herbs, classically tarragon, chervil, chives and parsley, sometimes with blanched spinach for colour. Blanch the herbs briefly, squeeze dry, chop or sieve very fine, and fold into mayonnaise to taste.
- Raw eggThe mayonnaise is uncooked. Use pasteurized eggs or a good commercial mayonnaise as the base if you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised.
- ChickenOne and a half cups of cubes is the meat from about one large poached or roasted breast plus a thigh, or roughly 8 ounces cooked. Keep it cold; the salad should not sit at room temperature while you assemble it.
- YieldRoughly three small first-course servings, or two as a lunch; the recipe gives no yield. Dress and mask only what will be eaten, since the walnuts soften once they meet the mayonnaise.
The name tells you more about 1896 dining rooms than about Egypt. American and English cooks of the period liked to attach exotic geography to composed salads, a fashion often said to have run alongside a broader Egyptomania, though nothing connects this particular salad's name to any specific source of that enthusiasm. No Egyptian element is present in the dish itself: chicken, celery, walnuts and mayonnaise are the standard vocabulary of the American chicken salad, which by the 1890s was a fixture of luncheons, church suppers and hotel menus. What lifts it is the ravigote, a French sauce name from ravigoter, to revive or perk up, applied since the eighteenth century to sharp herb-based sauces served hot or cold. Its appearance here, cross-referenced to another page rather than explained, shows how far classical French sauce work had settled into the teaching of a Boston cooking school aimed at ordinary households.