Egg Salad
6 Eggs 1 Doz. Potatoes Onion Cooked Salad Dressing Boil eggs until very mealy. Boil potatoes, cut in dice and add few slices of onion. Put in layers alternately, and pour over the dressing.
Chicken, Cold, cut in dice Celery Salt, Pepper French Dressing Mayonnaise Add the celery, cut fine, to the chicken and season with salt and pepper. Mix with French dressing and set aside for an hour. Before serving stir in some mayonnaise, slightly thinned with French dressing or lemon juice, arrange on lettuce leaves and cover with thick mayonnaise.
Two salads have been run together here by the typesetter: an egg-and-potato salad, and a cold chicken salad that begins at "Chicken, Cold, cut in dice." Treat them as separate dishes.
- Ingredient lists without quantitiesThe lists assume the cook knows proportions. For the egg salad, six eggs to a dozen potatoes; a dozen medium potatoes runs roughly 3 to 4 lb, and the "few slices of onion" means just that -- a small onion's worth of paper-thin slices at most. The chicken salad is generally made with something near equal volumes of diced meat and finely cut celery.
- "Very mealy" eggsThis means fully hard-cooked, with the yolk dry and crumbly rather than jammy. Twelve minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water, gets there without the grey-green ring.
- Cooked salad dressingNot mayonnaise. A boiled dressing thickened with egg and a little flour, sharpened with vinegar and mustard, and often let down with milk or cream. It was the standard household dressing before jarred mayonnaise, and it is what makes an old-style potato salad taste tangy rather than rich. A bought "cooked" or "boiled" dressing works, or make one.
- French dressing, 1900 senseOil and vinegar with salt and pepper, three parts oil to one of vinegar, whisked to a temporary emulsion. No sugar, no ketchup, nothing red.
- Dress the potatoes warmDiced potatoes take up dressing best while still warm from the pot; dressed cold they tend to stay bland, with the dressing sitting on top. Layer and pour while they are still warm.
- The hour of standingFor the chicken salad, the rest in French dressing is a marinade, not idle time. Do it covered in the refrigerator, not on the counter, and stir in the mayonnaise only just before it goes to the table or it will loosen and weep.
- Raw egg in the mayonnaiseIf you make the mayonnaise rather than buying it, use pasteurized eggs for anyone elderly, pregnant, or immune-compromised, since nothing here is cooked after mixing.
- YieldThe egg salad as written should feed eight to ten as a side. The chicken salad depends on your bird; a 3 lb roast chicken picked over gives roughly 3 cups of dice, enough for about six on lettuce.
Bride's cook books were compiled as wedding-shower gifts through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sometimes by a church group or a local newspaper, and they tend to favor exactly this kind of shorthand: a list of components and a sentence of assembly, on the assumption that the new wife had watched her mother do it. The two salads here mark a real division in period cookery. Boiled or "cooked" dressing, thickened with egg and flour, was the thrifty everyday dressing of the American kitchen, cheap because it stretched a little oil or none at all with milk; mayonnaise, which needs a cup of good oil beaten in drop by drop, was company food. Chicken salad was a fashionable luncheon dish of the period, associated with church suppers and ladies' clubs, and the sequence of French dressing first and mayonnaise last is common advice in cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s, on the reasoning that the thin dressing seasons the meat while the thick one only coats it.