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Chicken Salad (Four chickens two bunches)
Four chickens; two bunches of celery to each chicken; one pint vinegar, two eggs, two table-spoons salad oil, two of liquid mustard, one of sugar, one of salt, one salt-spoon red pepper; make a cus tard of eggs and vinegar; beat oil, mustard, and red pepper together; stir into custard; add celery just before using. The above is sufficient for twenty persons. Mrs. J. W. G., Richmond,
A boiled-dressing chicken salad scaled for a crowd, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed you already knew how to poach a fowl. The seasonings are given for the whole batch; everything else has to be inferred.
- The hinge: don't scramble the custardWhisk the eggs into the vinegar cold, then cook over a double boiler or the lowest possible heat, stirring constantly, until it coats a spoon. Vinegar sets egg protein fast, and direct heat will curdle it into sour scrambled egg in seconds.
- The dressing is under-egged by modern standardsTwo eggs to a pint of vinegar gives a very thin, sharp sauce. Other boiled dressings of the period often use more yolks, or add a spoonful of flour slaked in a little milk to thicken. Expect a dressing that soaks in rather than clings.
- Salt-spoonA salt-spoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon. Red pepper here means ground cayenne, not paprika or chilli flakes.
- Liquid mustardPrepared mustard from a jar, not mustard powder. A smooth, mild prepared mustard is the closest substitute.
- Salad oilA neutral bland oil, usually olive or cottonseed at the time. Two tablespoons for four chickens is a token amount; the dressing gets its body from egg, not oil.
- Celery quantityEight bunches of celery to four chickens is more celery than chicken by volume. Nineteenth-century celery was often blanched, slimmer and milder than the modern Pascal stalks; two or three ribs per chicken gives a more familiar balance, and the tender inner stalks and leaves are the part to use.
- The chickensPoach or simmer them, cool in the liquid so the meat stays moist, then pull the meat off in pieces rather than shredding it fine. Depending on the size of the birds, four chickens might give somewhere in the region of 5-6 lb of picked meat.
- Add the celery late, and the dressing laterSalt and vinegar draw water out of celery within the hour. Dress and combine no more than half an hour before it goes to the table, or the salad sits in a watery puddle.
- YieldStated as enough for twenty, which suggests it was one dish among several rather than a main course.
Chicken salad in American cookbooks of this period often takes this form: poached fowl, a great deal of celery, and a cooked egg-and-vinegar dressing, though mayonnaise-dressed versions are common in the same decades. The boiled dressing was the practical choice for quantity cooking, and quantity is the point here — this is church-supper, wedding-breakfast or ladies'-luncheon food, the sort of contribution a subscriber signed with initials and a city. Celery was itself something of a status vegetable in the late nineteenth century, expensive to grow because it had to be earthed up or boarded to blanch it, and it was often served upright in a dedicated glass vase on the table; using two bunches per chicken was a small display of means.