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Chicken Salad
2 cups diced chicken
Garnish of celery tops, beets
1 cup diced celery cut into dice, capers, egg- Mayonnaise yolks, etc.
Lettuce
Left-over chicken makes a very good salad. To prepare a chicken especially for salad, rub well with salt and pepper, place one small onion and one bay-leaf inside, wrap with a napkin, tie securely and steam for three hours, or until a fork can be easily turned around in the meat. When the chicken is cold, cut the breast with a knife into pieces not too small and sprinkle with French dressing. The dark meat should not be used if a pretty salad is desired. If dark meat is used, cut in smaller cubes than white meat and the white meat will predominate in appearance. Marinate the chicken mixture and let it stand. Make a mayonnaise dressing, stir part of it into the celery, place the latter on a thin layer of lettuce, or else arrange it directly upon the salad-dish and dispose the tips of the celery prettily about the edge. Heap the chicken mixture in the center, pour over it the remainder of the mayonnaise, and garnish with white celery tops, beets cut in dice, capers, cold hard-boiled yolks of eggs that have been pressed through a colander, or any other arrangement that pleases the fancy.
A straightforward composed salad, but two of the instructions belong to a different bird and a different pantry. Read the steaming time and the phrase "French dressing" before you start.
- "French dressing" in 1900"French dressing" here -- Not the sweet orange bottled dressing. In period usage it means a plain vinaigrette: oil and vinegar, commonly around three to one, with salt and pepper.
- Three hours of steamingThat timing assumes a mature stewing fowl. A supermarket 3 1/2 to 4 lb chicken steams through in about an hour; check that the thigh joint moves freely and the meat pulls easily. Three hours would leave you with shreds.
- Wrapped in a napkinThe cloth would have helped hold the bird together in the steamer and made it liftable. Cheesecloth or a length of clean muslin does the same; skip it if you are steaming in a basket you can lift out whole.
- Mayonnaise and raw eggPeriod mayonnaise is raw yolk, oil and vinegar. If you make it from scratch, use pasteurized eggs, and keep the finished salad refrigerated — diced cooked chicken in a cold dressing is a classic vehicle for bacterial growth if it sits out on a buffet.
- White meat onlyThe advice about excluding dark meat is purely cosmetic. Use the legs if you like; cut them small, as instructed, so the white meat still reads as the dominant colour.
- Pressed egg yolk garnishHard-boiled yolks pushed through a colander or fine sieve give the fluffy yellow "mimosa" scatter. Do it directly over the assembled salad; the strands compact if you move them.
- YieldTwo cups of diced chicken with a cup of celery serves four as a lunch course, or six on lettuce as part of a larger spread.
Chicken salad in this dressed, mayonnaise-bound form became a fixture of American ladies' luncheons, church suppers and hotel menus in the second half of the nineteenth century. The emphasis here on appearance — white meat only, celery tips arranged around the rim, diced beets and sieved yolk for colour — reflects a period preference for cold dishes that were built rather than merely mixed. Butterick was a pattern company that also published household books. The opening line is the more honest one: the recipe begins by treating this as a way to use up left-over chicken, with steaming a bird expressly for salad offered as the alternative.