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Chicken Salad (Boil three chickens until)
Boil three chickens until tender, salting to taste; when cold cut in small pieces and add twice the quantity of celery cut up with a knife but not chopped, and four cold-boiled eggs sliced and thoroughly mixed through the other ingredients. For dressing, put on stove a sauce-pan with one pint vinegar and butter size of an egg; beat two or three eggs with two table-spoons mustard, one of black pepper, two of sugar, and a tea-spoon salt, and when thoroughly beaten together pour slowly into the vinegar until it thickens. Be careful not to cook too long or the egg will curdle. Remove, and when cold pour over salad. This may be prepared the day before, adding the dressing just before using. Add lemon juice to improve the flavor, and garnish the top with slices of lemon. -Mrs. C. E. Skinner, Battle Creek, Mich.
A large-format church-supper salad with a cooked (boiled) dressing rather than mayonnaise. The dressing is the only tricky part, and the recipe tells you why: take it off the heat before the eggs scramble.
- Scale and yieldThree chickens plus twice their volume in celery makes something on the order of 25 to 30 servings. For a household quantity, work from one 4 lb bird and cut the dressing to a third.
- "Butter size of an egg"About 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Nineteenth-century books use the measure constantly.
- The mustard is dryThe mustard is probably dry -- Two tablespoons of mustard in a recipe of this period most likely means powdered English-style mustard rather than a prepared jarred condiment; prepared mustard would alter the acidity and liquid.
- Pepper and vinegarA tablespoon of black pepper and a full pint of vinegar are both assertive by current taste. Household vinegar then varied widely in strength; with standard 5 percent cider vinegar, consider starting with less and adjusting.
- Cooking the dressingThis is the hinge. Warm the vinegar and butter, then add a ladle of it to the beaten egg mixture before returning everything to the pan, and hold it below about 180F, stirring constantly, until it coats a spoon. Past that the egg breaks into curds. Strain it if it does.
- Poaching the chickenA bare simmer, not a rolling boil, keeps the breast from going stringy. A 4 lb bird takes roughly 50 to 60 minutes; the thigh should read 165F. Cooling the meat in its own broth keeps it moist.
- Celery cut, not choppedThe instruction is deliberate. Knife-cut pieces stay crisp and distinct against the chicken, where chopping releases water and softens the salad.
- Make-ahead and storageFollow the original here: keep the cut chicken, celery and eggs refrigerated and dress them only at serving. A dressed salad of this size sitting at room temperature for a party is where trouble starts.
Chicken salad of this kind was a fixture of American church suppers, lodge dinners and ladies' luncheons through the second half of the nineteenth century, and books like The Dixie Cook Book were built from exactly such contributed recipes, each signed with a name and a town. The dressing is a boiled dressing, a common American salad sauce before commercially bottled mayonnaise became widely available in the early twentieth century; it is cooked with vinegar, mustard and egg. The heavy proportion of celery is worth noting too: celery was a comparatively costly, faintly fashionable vegetable in this period, and the recipe calls for twice as much of it as chicken.