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Chicken Salad (Boil one chicken tender chop)
Boil one chicken tender; chop moderately fine the whites of twelve hard-boiled eggs and the chicken; add equal quantities of chopped celery and cabbage; mash the yolks fine, add two tablespoons butter, two of sugar, one tea-spoon mustard; pepper and salt to taste; and lastly, one half-cup good cider vinegar; pour over the salad, and mix thoroughly. If no celery is at hand, use chopped pickled cucumbers or lettuce and celery seed. This may be mixed two or three days before using. - Mrs. Judge Lawrence, Bellefontaine.
A cooked-yolk dressing rather than a mayonnaise, which is why it holds up in the refrigerator instead of breaking. The proportions are given by eye, so a little translation helps.
- The hinge: build the dressing separatelyMash the twelve yolks to a smooth paste with the softened butter, sugar and mustard before any vinegar goes in, then work the vinegar in gradually. Dumping the vinegar onto cold, lumpy yolks leaves you with gritty specks that never smooth out.
- "Boil one chicken tender"This means simmer a whole chicken until the meat is tender, not a modern chicken tender. Use a 3 1/2 to 4 lb bird, barely simmered 60 to 75 minutes; it will yield roughly 4 cups of chopped meat. Save the broth.
- Butter, softenedTake yours out an hour ahead or it will not blend with the yolks.
- MustardDry mustard powder, not prepared. A teaspoon of English or Colman's is roughly what was meant; prepared mustard would add both vinegar and liquid.
- Proportions of the vegetables"Equal quantities of chopped celery and cabbage" most likely means equal to each other rather than to the chicken, though the wording will bear either reading. About 1 1/2 cups of each against 4 cups of chicken keeps it a chicken salad rather than a slaw.
- The vinegarHalf a cup of cider vinegar with only two tablespoons of sugar is sharp by current taste, and cider vinegar of the period was not standardised to today's 5 percent, so its strength may have differed. Add two-thirds of it, taste, then decide.
- The celery-seed substitutionIf you take the lettuce-and-celery-seed route, use no more than half a teaspoon of seed and add the lettuce only at serving; it wilts within the hour.
- Making it days aheadThe instruction assumes a cold cellar or an icebox. Cooked chicken salad keeps three to four days at or below 40F and no longer; a day ahead is plenty for the flavours to settle.
- YieldAs scaled above, about eight generous servings, on lettuce or between bread.
Chicken salad in this period is a dressed cold-meat dish rather than a leaf salad, and the dressing here belongs to the American "boiled" or cooked-dressing family that predates the spread of bottled mayonnaise: hard yolks, butter, sugar, mustard and vinegar, a formula that keeps far better in a cellar than an oil emulsion. Twelve eggs sounds extravagant until you notice they do double duty, the whites chopped into the body of the salad and the yolks becoming the sauce, so nothing is wasted. The credit line is characteristic of books compiled from contributions by named housekeepers, and Bellefontaine, Ohio, with the honorific "Mrs. Judge Lawrence," places the contributor in a Midwestern receipt-exchange culture. The cabbage-for-celery and pickled-cucumber substitutions are a reminder that celery was a seasonal crop before refrigerated rail shipping made it a year-round item.