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Chicken Salad (IV)
Mary Norton.
Take the breasts of four well boiled chickens, cut in small pieces, but not too fine; mix with the chicken eight teacups of celery cut also in small pieces, and, with the above, the chopped whites of twelve hard-boiled eggs. For dressing, the yolks of four raw eggs; beat into them half an ordinary sized bottle of olive oil, beginning with teaspoon, and adding no more than that at a time, until it is thoroughly mixed; then add the wellmashed and pulverized yolks of twelve eggs, salt and pepper, three tablespoons mustard, a pinch of cayenne pepper, and a gill of vinegar; then stir this dressing thoroughly into the mixed chicken, celery, and white of eggs.
A church-supper salad scaled for a crowd, built on a hand-beaten mayonnaise enriched with cooked yolks. The dressing is the whole job; the salad itself is only cutting.
- Add the oil slowly or it breaksThe instruction to begin with a teaspoon of oil at a time and add no more than that is the hinge of the recipe. Four raw yolks will carry a cup or more of oil, but only if the first few tablespoons go in drop by drop with constant beating; dumped in, the emulsion separates and no amount of stirring recovers it.
- "Half an ordinary sized bottle"Genuinely ambiguous. Bottled olive oil of the period came in a range of sizes, so this is probably somewhere between 1/2 cup and 1 cup. Work by eye: beat in oil until the dressing is thick and holds a ribbon, then stop.
- Teacups and gillsA teacup in books of this kind is reckoned at somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 cup, so eight teacups of celery is roughly five to six cups. A gill is half a cup — that is a lot of vinegar, and it is worth adding it in stages and tasting.
- The mustardThree tablespoons probably means dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard from a jar. Prepared mustard in that quantity would thin the dressing and push it sour.
- Cooked yolks as thickenerThe twelve hard-boiled yolks, mashed smooth and worked in at the end, are what turns a mayonnaise into the heavy, pale dressing of the period. Push them through a sieve rather than mashing with a fork; any lump stays a lump.
- Raw yolksThe dressing is never cooked. If you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs, and keep the finished salad refrigerated rather than standing on a buffet.
- The chickenBreasts from four boiled birds is about 2 to 2 1/2 lb of cooked meat. Poach bone-in breasts and cool them in their liquid; "small pieces, but not too fine" means roughly half-inch dice, not shreds.
- YieldAs written this feeds twenty to twenty-five as a supper dish. Halving or quartering it is straightforward, though the dressing is easier to emulsify with at least two yolks.
Chicken salad appears again and again in American charity and community cookbooks of the 1870s, and The Home Cook Book — compiled from contributed receipts and sold for a benevolent cause, with each dish credited to the woman who gave it, as this one is to Mary Norton — is a good example of the genre. The dish belonged to the tea table and the church supper rather than to dinner: cold, made ahead, easy to multiply, and dependent on celery, which in the northern states meant late autumn and winter, when the blanched stalks came out of the sand and were prized enough to be served on their own in tall glass vases. Four separate chicken salads in one book, each slightly different, is a reminder of how these collections were assembled — not edited into a single authoritative version, but printed as several households actually made it. The dressing here sits between two traditions, the beaten oil-and-raw-yolk mayonnaise of French practice and the older English habit of pounding hard-boiled yolks into a salad sauce; the cook uses both at once.