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Chicken Salad
Mrs. Morgan. -SIDNEY SMITH.
Cut the white meat of chickens into small bits the size of peas, (also the dark meat if you like), chop the whole parts of celery nearly as small. Prepare a dressing thus: Rub the yolks of hard boiled eggs smooth ; to each yolk put half a teaspoon of mustard, the same quantity of salt, a tablespoon of oil, and a wine glass of vinegar; mix the chicken and celery in a large bowl and pour over this dressing with a little cream added. The dressing must not be put on till just before it is served.
A cooked-chicken salad from a community cookbook, given in the telegraphic style of its day: no quantities for the chicken, no cooking instructions, and a dressing built on hard-boiled yolks rather than raw ones. The proportions need a hand on the reins.
- The dressing ratio is the thing to watchA tablespoon of oil to a wine glass of vinegar per yolk is roughly one part oil to four parts vinegar, which is far sharper than any modern dressing. Build it with the oil first, add vinegar a spoonful at a time, and stop when it tastes right; the cream at the end is what pulls it back.
- Wine glassIn nineteenth-century receipts a wine glass is generally reckoned at about 2 fl oz (a quarter cup), not a modern stemmed pour of 5 or 6 oz.
- MustardDry mustard powder, not prepared mustard from a jar. Half a teaspoon per yolk is assertive; let the dressing stand ten minutes so the mustard's heat blooms before you judge the seasoning.
- "The whole parts of celery"An obscure phrase; it may mean the solid ribs, trimmed of leaves and strings, rather than the coarse outer stalks. The recipe asks only that they be chopped "nearly as small" as the pea-sized chicken.
- The chickenNo cooking method is given; cold cooked fowl is the likely assumption. Poached breast, cooled in its liquid and diced, gives the moistest result.
- Dress at the last minuteThis is the one point the writer bothered to spell out, and it holds. Vinegar draws water out of the celery, so a salad dressed an hour ahead sits in a thin pool.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; about 1 lb of diced chicken with a similar volume of celery would serve four as a main course, six on lettuce as a first course.
Chicken salad of this kind is generally traced to the second half of the nineteenth century, when celery is often said to have moved from a costly forced luxury to a reliable winter market vegetable in North America and to have become the standard partner for cold fowl. The attribution to Sydney Smith points to the English clergyman and wit whose rhymed salad dressing receipt, built on hard-boiled egg yolk, mustard, oil and vinegar, was reprinted in newspapers and cookbooks on both sides of the Atlantic for decades after his death in 1845; his verse is very likely the ancestor of the dressing here, filtered through a contributor's kitchen. It also shows a moment before commercial mayonnaise: the dressing depends on cooked yolk and cream rather than raw yolk beaten into oil.