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Chicken Salad (Chop fine one chicken cooked)
Chop fine one chicken cooked tender, one head cabbage, and five cold hard-boiled eggs; season with salt, pepper and mustard to taste; warm one pint vinegar, add half a tea-cup butter, stir until melted, pour hot over the mixture, stir thoroughly, and set away to cool.
A cooked-dressing salad from the era before bottled mayonnaise, closer to a chicken-and-cabbage slaw than to the celery-and-mayonnaise chicken salad that later took the name. A few of the measures need translating and the vinegar wants tasting before it all goes in.
- The chicken"One chicken cooked tender" implies a bird simmered until the meat falls from the bone, most likely an older boiling fowl; a 3 to 4 lb raw chicken will give somewhere around 3 to 4 cups of chopped meat. Poached or leftover roast chicken works; save some of the poaching liquid in case the salad needs loosening.
- Half a tea-cup butterA 19th-century teacup is not a fixed measure; it is variously reckoned anywhere from about 4 to 6 fl oz, so half a teacup is somewhere between 4 and 6 tablespoons, say 2 to 3 oz. Measured against a modern 8 oz cup it would come to 4 oz — err toward the smaller amount.
- One pint of vinegar is a lotThat is 2 cups for a few cups of meat, and the strength of home-made period vinegar varied a good deal, so it may not have bitten as hard as today's 5 percent distilled white. Start with a cup, taste, and add more; cider vinegar is likely closer in character to what such a kitchen would have used.
- "Mustard" means the powderBare "mustard" in receipts of this kind usually indicates dry mustard rather than the bright yellow prepared kind, which is a later product. Use dry mustard, about a teaspoon to start, whisked into the warm vinegar so it disperses rather than sitting in lumps.
- Warm, not boiledThe vinegar only needs to be hot enough to melt the butter. Boiling it drives off aroma and makes the fumes unpleasant in a closed kitchen. Pour it over while hot so the cabbage wilts slightly and the dressing coats everything.
- Chop, do not shredThe whole point of the texture here is that chicken, cabbage and egg are cut to the same fine dice so no one element dominates. Long slaw-cut cabbage ribbons will separate out and go limp.
- Cooling and keeping"Set away to cool" meant a cold pantry or cellar. Cool it and refrigerate; the acid and the chopped egg together mean this is best eaten within two days.
- YieldEnough for 8 to 10 as a side or a light main course, served cold; lettuce or soda crackers suit it, though the recipe says nothing about how it was served.
Chicken salad in American cookbooks of the 1870s and 80s covers two quite different things: the delicate celery-and-mayonnaise version served at ladies' luncheons, and thrifty preparations like this one, where a boiled fowl is stretched with cabbage and eggs and dressed with hot vinegar and butter. The hot dressing poured over chopped cabbage is the same technique behind wilted slaws and hot potato salad, and it did double duty — the acid seasoned the dish and helped it keep in a household without reliable refrigeration. The Dixie Cook-Book was assembled in the 1880s from contributed receipts, in the manner of the compiled community cookbooks of the period: the same chapter might hold a French-inflected dish from a city kitchen and a farm recipe built around a spent laying hen.