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Mock Chicken Salad
Cut any cold fresh pork in pieces suitable for salad. To two cups of such meat add three tablespoonfuls of hot vinegar and set away to get very cold. When ready to prepare the salad, drain off any of the vinegar remaining and add one and onehalf cups of crisp celery cut small, and pour over all a cooked salad dressing (see page 75). Serve on crisp lettuce leaves.
A straightforward cold salad built on leftover roast pork, with vinegar standing in for the flavour of chicken. The only technique worth attention is the vinegar marinade.
- The hinge: hot vinegar, cold restThe vinegar goes on hot and the meat is then set away to get very cold, which presumably gives the acid time to work into the cut surfaces. Whatever the mechanism, follow the two steps as written, and drain well: excess vinegar left in the bowl will loosen the dressing.
- "Cold fresh pork"Fresh here means unsalted and uncured — roast loin, shoulder or leg, not ham or bacon. Cured pork would push the salad far too salty once dressing is added.
- Cooked salad dressingThe recipe cross-refers to a cooked (boiled) dressing on page 75, which is not reproduced here; period cooked dressings are generally built on egg, vinegar, mustard and a thickener, cooked until thick. Any modern boiled-dressing recipe works, as does mayonnaise thinned with a spoonful of the drained vinegar.
- QuantitiesTwo cups of diced meat is roughly 12 oz. With the celery this makes about four modest first-course servings, or two as a lunch.
- Celery"Crisp" is doing real work — the salad has no other texture. Use inner ribs, sliced thin, and hold them in ice water if they have gone limp in the drawer.
- SeasoningThe original assumes the dressing carries all the salt. Taste after mixing; leftover roast that was seasoned on the outside only will read bland once diced.
"Mock" dishes run through nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookery as a matter of thrift rather than deception — mock turtle, mock duck, mock oysters — and mock chicken salad belongs to the same family. Chicken salad was the fashionable luncheon and church-supper dish of the era, but roasting fowl cost more than a pork shoulder, and the acid-and-celery treatment here mimics the pale, tart, crunchy character that diners associated with it. The recipe instructs the cook to cut the meat "in pieces suitable for salad" rather than giving a dimension.