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Chicken Salad
Cut the flesh of a cold roasted fowl into pieces; take one or two lettuces, trim off the outside leaves, wash the remainder thoroughly and dry on a cloth. Then cut them up or pull them to pieces with the fingers and put them in a salad-bowl with the pieces of fowl. Skin and bone three anchovies, cut them into thin strips and lay them over the pieces of fowl. Beat an egg and mix it with one heaped teaspoonful of dry mustard, and a sufficient quantity of salad oil and vinegar. Season the dressing to taste with salt and pepper and sugar. Pour it over the contents of the salad-bowl. The salad should be served immediately after the dressing is poured over it.
A plain composed salad of the older English type: leaves, cold poultry, anchovy, and an egg-thickened vinaigrette mixed at the table. Almost everything hinges on the dressing, which the original leaves half-measured.
- The dressing proportionsThe recipe gives no quantity for oil or vinegar. One egg, a heaped teaspoon of dry mustard, and roughly 6 tablespoons oil to 2 tablespoons vinegar makes about two-thirds of a cup, enough for a salad for four. Beat the mustard into the egg first, then add the oil in a thin stream so it emulsifies rather than separating.
- Raw eggThe egg is never heated. If the salad is going to anyone elderly, pregnant, very young, or immune-compromised, use a pasteurized egg or pasteurized liquid egg; the risk is Salmonella on and in the shell egg, and nothing in this method reduces it.
- "Cold roasted fowl"A fowl in this period meant a mature bird, tougher and more flavorful than a modern broiler. The recipe gives no quantity; the meat from a roasted 4 to 5 lb chicken yields roughly 4 cups of pieces, a workable amount for the volume of lettuce called for. Use both light and dark meat and cut in bite-sized pieces rather than shredding.
- Salad oilThen, usually olive oil, sometimes cottonseed. Either a mild olive oil or a neutral oil works; a strongly bitter modern extra-virgin will fight the anchovy and the mustard.
- The anchoviesThree whole salted anchovies are called for, not three fillets from a can. If using salt-packed fish, rinse and soak them briefly before boning; if using oil-packed fillets, six fillets is the equivalent and no soaking is needed.
- Drying the lettuceThe instruction to dry on a cloth is the part people skip and the part that decides the outcome. Water clinging to the leaves thins the dressing and keeps it from clinging. A salad spinner does the same job faster.
- Serve immediatelyAcid and salt collapse lettuce within minutes, and the egg emulsion will begin to weep. Dress at the table, toss, and take it straight out. Everything else can be prepared hours ahead and held cold.
- YieldNo yield is given in the original; the quantities suggest about four generous portions as a luncheon dish, or six as a first course.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms at the Waldorf from 1893 and put his name to this 1896 collection, which gathers hotel practice alongside a great deal of standard household cookery of the day. This particular chicken salad is the older English style rather than the creamy American one: leaves, cold roast bird, anchovy, and a mustard-and-egg dressing beaten up at serving time, closer to the eighteenth-century "salamongundy" and salad-magundy tradition than to the celery-and-mayonnaise chicken salad that had already become a fixture of American church suppers and ladies' luncheons by the 1890s. The anchovy is doing the work that Worcestershire or anchovy essence often did in period dressings, supplying salt and savor to bland cold poultry. Note also the assumption behind the whole recipe, common in hotel and household books alike: a roast fowl was expected to be served hot at one meal and turned into something else cold at the next.