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Chicken Salad, Mrs. Griscom
Peel skin off chicken cooked yesterday, then carefully detach all meat from bones, cut it into half-inch pieces and place in a vessel. Shell, peel and cut into quarters twenty-four hazel-nuts and add to the vessel. Thoroughly wash and wipe two well-trimmed stalks fresh, crisp, white celery (the perfect white part only), cut it into half-inch pieces, drain again in a napkin and add to the chicken. Cut into half-inch pieces a half pint cooked and well-drained cold string beans, add to the chicken with a light half tablespoon capers and two cold, hard-boiled eggs cut in small pieces. Toss all well together, then transfer to a salad bowl, add three good saltspoons salt, one and a half tablespoons of best olive oil and one light tablespoon strained lemon juice. Mix well, and just before sending to table add three good tablespoons mayonnaise dressing, rapidly mix, neatly wipe bowl all around and serve.
A composed salad from the Delmonico's tradition, built on yesterday's roast or boiled fowl. The measurements are pre-standardization but all convert cleanly.
- Dress it lastThe oil, lemon and salt go on shortly before service and the mayonnaise at the very last moment. Celery and string beans weep once salted, and mayonnaise thinned by that liquid will slump into the bottom of the bowl.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so "three good saltspoons" is a scant teaspoon of salt. Add half, taste after the mayonnaise goes in, then correct.
- Half pint of beansOne cup of cooked, drained string beans. Cook them until just tender and shock in cold water so they stay green and firm enough to cut into half-inch lengths.
- Hazel-nutsTwenty-four hazelnuts is roughly a scant 1/4 cup. "Peel" means removing the papery skin: toast them at 350F for 10-12 minutes and rub them in a towel. Filbert and hazelnut are the same nut in books of this period.
- Chicken quantityThe original assumes one whole cooked bird, giving about 3 to 4 cups of half-inch meat. Skin and bones are discarded here, but they are worth keeping for stock rather than the trash.
- The celery"The perfect white part only" means the pale inner heart, not the dark outer ribs. Drying it in a napkin is not fussiness; surface water is what breaks a mayonnaise-bound salad.
- MayonnaiseThree tablespoons is a light coating, not a bound salad in the modern deli sense. If you use a commercial mayonnaise, cut the added lemon juice slightly, since jarred versions are already sharply acidic.
- Yield and holdingServes four to six as a lunch course. Keep the cut components refrigerated until you assemble; cooked chicken and chopped egg held at room temperature are the weak point in any salad of this kind.
This appears in Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book, and it belongs to a genre that barely exists anymore: the dish tagged with a woman's surname. Filippini spent years in the Delmonico's kitchens in New York, and his books carry many dishes named for individuals -- a form of credit and of flattery at once -- though who Mrs. Griscom was, and why the salad bears her name, the book does not say. The salad itself shows how far chicken salad has drifted. This version is a composed dish of carefully cut cold meat given texture by celery and nuts, seasoned first with oil, lemon and salt as a plain salad would be, and only then finished with a spoonful or two of mayonnaise. Building it from "chicken cooked yesterday" reads less as thrift dressed up as elegance than as an unremarkable use for a fowl in a household that roasted or boiled the bird whole. The instruction to wipe the bowl before it leaves the kitchen reads like a professional service kitchen writing for domestic readers.