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Chicken Salad (III)
Mrs. Hobbs.
Three chickens chopped fine, both light and dark meat; the juice of two lemons; eight or ten eggs boiled hard; the whites chopped fine and the yolks mashed fine, moisten with six teaspoons melted butter, two of sweet oil; to which add one tablespoon of mustard, one of pepper, one of salt, one of sugar, three of cream; and last, add six large bunches of celery chopped fine, with sufficient vinegar to moisten the whole.
A contributor's recipe in the old shorthand: no cooking times, no yield, and the assumption that you already have poached fowl on hand. The dressing is the interesting part — a cooked-yolk emulsion rather than a mayonnaise.
- The chicken is already cookedThe recipe takes for granted that the birds were simmered and cooled beforehand. Poach whole chickens or thighs and breasts in salted water until 165F at the thickest point, cool in the broth, then pull and chop. Meat chopped while warm will shred rather than dice.
- Scale it downThree chickens of the 1870s ran perhaps 2.5 to 3 lb each dressed, which after boning and cooking gives something in the region of 3 to 4 lb of picked meat -- a party-sized bowl. A third of the recipe (one chicken, three eggs, two bunches of celery) is a realistic batch for a modern household.
- Sweet oilPlain olive oil, which in this period was often sold by druggists as well as grocers. Use a mild olive oil, not a peppery finishing one, which will fight the mustard.
- Mustard means powderMustard -- The recipe does not say which. In dressings of this date the word commonly meant dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard, and a tablespoon of powder in a batch this size reads as assertive rather than excessive. If using powder, slake it in a little of the cream first so it blooms.
- A tablespoon of pepperThat is a large amount even for a batch this size. Add it by degrees and taste as you go.
- Six bunches of celeryAmbiguous. A 'bunch' here most likely means a single head, though heads were generally smaller than modern ones and may have been trimmed back to the tender inner ribs. Judge by volume instead: celery and chicken in roughly equal parts by bulk is the usual proportion in salads of this kind.
- The dressing hinges on the yolksMash the hard yolks to a smooth paste before any liquid goes in, then work in the butter and oil gradually. Dumped in together they stay granular and the vinegar will not carry. Melted butter also sets firm when chilled, so dress the salad no more than an hour or two before serving and keep it cool but not ice-cold.
- ServingMound on a platter lined with crisp lettuce, the chopped egg whites scattered over. Chicken salad left standing at room temperature is the classic vehicle for foodborne illness at a picnic — hold it refrigerated until it goes to the table.
The Home Cook Book was assembled in Chicago in the mid-1870s from recipes contributed by named local women, sold to benefit the Home for the Friendless — which is why the same dish appears three or four times over, each version signed by a different cook, and why the instructions read like one neighbour telling another rather than like a professional's formula. Chicken salad of this kind, chicken and celery bound with an egg-and-oil dressing, was one of the fixed points of American company cooking, and had been for decades before this book appeared: it could be made from a boiled fowl the day before, stretched to feed a crowd, and served cold at a supper or a church social without a stove. The cooked-yolk dressing here is older than mayonnaise's dominance in the American kitchen; hard yolks mashed with butter, oil, mustard and vinegar make a stable sauce without the whisking skill or the raw-egg risk of a true emulsion, and versions of it persisted in home cookbooks long after bottled mayonnaise arrived.