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Chicken Salad (II)
Mrs. Higgins.
Two chickens, chopped coarse; eight heads of celery, three eggs, one pint vinegar, one tablespoon flour, one tablespoon sugar, rub the yolks of the eggs to a fine powder, then add the salt, mustard, and oil, mixing well together; then add the cream; and after that the vinegar and raw egg.
This is a contributor's shorthand rather than a worked recipe: the ingredient list and the method do not match, and several quantities are missing entirely. Read it as a set of proportions to reconstruct, not a procedure to follow line by line.
- The missing ingredientsThe method calls for salt, mustard, oil and cream, none of which appear in the list, and it never uses the flour or sugar that do. Contributors to community compilations frequently left the standard salad dressing unstated; as a plausible reconstruction for this quantity, try roughly a teaspoon each of salt and dry mustard, a cup of oil and a cup of cream.
- Flour and sugar mean a boiled dressingA tablespoon of flour with a pint of vinegar points to the cooked dressing common in American household cookery, where vinegar, flour, sugar and yolks are thickened over heat before the oil and cream go in. As written the two halves of the recipe have been run together; deciding which dressing you want, cooked or uncooked, is the first thing to settle.
- Eight heads of celeryA "head" is the whole bunch, not a single rib. Eight bunches to two chickens is far more celery than modern taste wants and produces a salad that is mostly celery by volume; two or three bunches, diced fine, is closer to a current balance.
- Two chickensThese were more likely mature fowl than small broilers, poached and cooled. Two birds of around three pounds, or the picked meat from them, is a workable equivalent; chop coarse, as directed, so the chicken keeps its texture against the celery.
- A pint of vinegarSixteen fluid ounces is a great deal of acid, and period vinegars were not standardised as the 5 percent product on shelves now is, so their strength varied. Start with a quarter of it and add to taste.
- Rubbing the yolksThe three eggs are evidently hard-boiled; the yolks are pressed through a sieve or worked with the back of a spoon until powdery, then the mustard, salt and oil are beaten in as for mayonnaise. The 'raw egg' at the end is unexplained -- it may be a fourth egg, or a whole egg reserved from the three.
- Raw egg in the dressingIf the dressing is not cooked, use pasteurised shell eggs, keep the salad below 40F, and do not leave it standing at room temperature; chicken salad is a classic vehicle for foodborne illness precisely because it is handled a lot and served cold.
- YieldTwo chickens with dressing will serve twelve to sixteen as a luncheon or buffet dish. Dress it no more than an hour or two ahead, or the celery weeps and the dressing loosens.
Chicken salad occupied a fixed place in the American and Canadian company table of the 1870s and 1880s: it could be made from birds already boiled, stretched with cheap celery, dressed in advance, and served cold at a supper, a church tea or a wedding breakfast without a cook standing over it. Compilations of this kind were assembled from recipes contributed by named local women, which is why this one arrives credited to Mrs. Higgins and written in the elliptical style of a note passed between neighbours who already shared the same assumptions. The abundance of celery is a period marker in itself; it was a fashionable and conspicuously fresh vegetable in the late nineteenth century, sold by the head and often set on the table in tall glasses to be admired. The recipe also sits at the point where the older cooked, flour-thickened salad dressing was giving way to oil-and-yolk mayonnaise, and the confusion in the method here is a fair picture of a cook using both at once.