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Mayonnaise of Chicken
Cut a cold roasted chicken into small joints, trim them to shape, lay them on a deep dish, dust over salt and pepper, lay two or three slices of onion on them, also a few cloves, and moisten with tarragon vinegar and salad oil. Let the pieces of fowl marinade for two or three hours, turning them occasionally so that all may be flavored. Wash two or three lettuces, dry them on a cloth and cut them into fine shreds with the exception of the hearts; heap these on a dish, drain, arrange the pieces of fowl on top, and coat well with mayonnaise sauce. Arrange the hearts tastefully around the dish cut in quarters, also quarters of hard-boiled eggs, slices of beet-root and stoned olives.
A composed cold chicken salad from the Waldorf's service era, built on a marinated bird rather than a dressed-and-tossed one. The marinade is the part that matters; skip it and you have plain cold chicken under sauce.
- The hinge: marinate the meat, not the saladTwo to three hours in oil, tarragon vinegar, onion and cloves flavours the chicken itself rather than just the surface of the finished salad. Cover and refrigerate rather than leaving it at room temperature, and turn the pieces two or three times so that all are flavoured, as the recipe directs.
- "Small joints"A roast chicken broken down at the joints, then trimmed "to shape"; that presumably means wing tips and ragged edges, and skin if you prefer the pieces neat. From a 3 1/2 to 4 lb bird expect roughly eight to ten pieces; for a serving dish you may prefer to pull the meat into large boneless pieces instead.
- Marinade proportionsOscar gives none. Three parts salad oil to one part tarragon vinegar, enough to come halfway up the chicken, is a workable ratio; four or five whole cloves is plenty, as they turn medicinal quickly.
- Salad oilIn 1896 this meant a mild olive oil, sometimes cottonseed or a blend. A light olive oil or a neutral oil works; a strong peppery modern olive oil will fight the tarragon.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and easy to make by steeping fresh tarragon in white wine vinegar for a week. White wine vinegar with a few bruised tarragon leaves is a fair substitute.
- "Two or three lettuces"Romaine or a firm butterhead, whole heads rather than bagged leaves, because the recipe needs the intact hearts for the garnish. Two large heads will shred to something on the order of 8 cups, loosely packed, depending on their size.
- The mayonnaiseHouse mayonnaise then was made raw-egg by hand. If you make your own, use pasteurized eggs for a dish that will sit out on a buffet; thin it slightly with a spoonful of the marinade so it coats rather than clags.
- Beet-rootCooked beets, not raw. Slice them and keep them apart from the mayonnaise until the last moment or the whole dish turns pink.
- Yield and servingServes four to six as a luncheon course. Assemble no more than half an hour before serving; shredded lettuce collapses under sauce.
Cold mayonnaise-coated dishes were a fixture of late nineteenth-century hotel and club luncheon menus, where a bird roasted for dinner could reappear the next day in a form grand enough to serve to guests. The name follows the French convention of naming the dish for its sauce -- mayonnaise de volaille -- rather than for the salad it sits on, which is why the chicken is coated rather than tossed. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel, published The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, and much of it records exactly this kind of dining-room repertoire: French technique, American ingredients, and an eye to how a platter looks when it reaches the table. The insistence on reserving the lettuce hearts, quartering them, and ringing the dish with egg, beet and olive is presentation instruction as much as cookery, and it belongs to a period when a cold dish was expected to be built, not stirred.