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Chicken Salad
1 tablespoonful lemon-juice 1/8 teaspoonful white pepper 1/4 teaspoonful salt Cut the cold chicken from the bones, using all the small bits. Have pieces uniform in size, and in shape of small cubes. Scrape celery and let stand several hours in ice-water, then dry in a clean napkin. Use half as much celery as chicken, and cut into pieces half the size. Make a French dressing of 1/4 tablespoonful lemon- 1 teaspoonful salt juice 3 tablespoonfuls oil teaspoonful white pepper Pour this over the chicken and celery, mix well, and put into ice-box to stand for fifteen minutes.
Drain the liquid from some canned sweet red peppers, and chop with stoned olives. Mix with the salad, and just before it is served pour mayonnaise dressing over it (see page 74), tossing it over and over with a silver fork until each piece is coated with the dressing. Put into a salad bowl, or on individual plates, and garnish with small tender ends and leaves of the celery, whole olives, and a few tiny cucumber pickles. Serve very cold.
A straightforward composed salad that depends more on temperature and cutting than on cooking. Two things in the original text need attention: a mangled dressing list and a cross-reference to a mayonnaise recipe on another page.
- The dressing, untangledThe type has run together in the original. It reads as 1 tablespoon lemon juice, 3 tablespoons oil, 1 teaspoon salt, and a fraction of a teaspoon of white pepper — the fraction is lost, so start with 1/4 teaspoon. A teaspoon of salt is generous for that little dressing; taste before you commit to all of it.
- The fifteen-minute marinade is the hingeFrench dressing on the chicken and celery first, then mayonnaise at the end, is what keeps the salad from tasting flat under the dressing. Skip the first step and no amount of mayonnaise fixes it.
- Scraping and icing the celery"Scrape" means running a knife down the ribs to pull off the coarse strings, standard when celery was tougher and less bred for tenderness. The ice-water soak makes it snap; an hour is enough with modern celery, and a salad spinner replaces the napkin.
- Canned sweet red peppersThese are jarred pimientos. Drain and blot them well or they bleed pink into the mayonnaise.
- Homemade mayonnaiseThe mayonnaise on page 74 is almost certainly a raw-yolk emulsion, as period mayonnaise dressings were. If you make it, use pasteurized eggs, and keep the finished salad refrigerated — mayonnaise-dressed cooked chicken should not sit out at room temperature. Good bought mayonnaise is a reasonable substitute here.
- Tiny cucumber picklesCornichons or gherkins, whole, for the garnish.
- Proportions and yieldProportions -- Half as much celery as chicken, cut half the size of the chicken cubes. The recipe gives no quantities and does not say whether the proportion is by weight or volume, so scale to whatever cold bird you have.
- Why a silver forkSilver was specified because carbon-steel cutlery could react with an acid dressing and leave a metallic taste; any modern fork, or your hands, will do. What matters is folding rather than stirring, so the cubes stay cubes.
Chicken salad in this cool, cubed, mayonnaise-bound form was a fixture of American luncheon menus from the late nineteenth century onward, and the instruction to cut the cold chicken from the bones 'using all the small bits' points to a dish built on what was left of a roast fowl. The insistence on uniform cubes, iced celery and a garnish of olives and pickles reflects the period's emphasis on a salad's appearance and its coldness. Dressing with French dressing first and adding mayonnaise at the last moment seasons the chicken and celery in their own right; canned pimientos were a comparatively recent convenience, and their bright red flecks are doing decorative work as much as anything else.