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Chicken Salad
Remove bones and gristle, fat and skin, from cold, cooked meat. Cut meat into -inch cubes and mix it with an equal amount of celery which has been scraped, chilled and cut in small pieces. Moisten with French dressing . Add mayonnaise dressing or boiled dressing to taste. Arrange on lettuce leaves; garnish with curled celery.
Veal, flaked fish, such as salmon, tuna, etc., may be mixed and used in the same way. 1 cup cheese
A method rather than a formula: the book assumes you have cold roast chicken and a jar of dressing already made. Two details in the text are damaged, and one is worth reading as a warning.
- The missing cube sizeThe original reads "-inch cubes"; the fraction has dropped out of the text and cannot be recovered honestly. Half-inch dice is a plausible reading, and dice of that size hold their shape against celery.
- The stray "1 cup cheese"This line appears to be a fragment from an adjacent recipe rather than part of this one. Cheese has no part in the salad as written.
- Proportions and yieldEqual volumes of meat and celery is the whole formula; the recipe specifies no quantities and no yield.
- French dressing first, then mayonnaiseThe two-stage dressing is deliberate rather than fussy: the oil and vinegar season the cold cooked meat before the mayonnaise binds it, whereas mayonnaise added first mainly coats the surface. The recipe gives no standing time.
- Boiled dressingAn egg-and-flour cooked dressing thickened over water, standard in American cookbooks before commercial mayonnaise was universal. It is tangier and less rich than mayonnaise; either works here.
- Scraped, chilled celeryScraping removes the coarse strings from outer ribs. The chilling is for crispness; the recipe has the celery scraped and chilled before it is cut.
- Curled celeryShort lengths of rib slit lengthwise several times at one end and dropped in ice water until the strips fan back. A long-standing garnish of the period; the curls need time in the water to set.
- Food safety, since it is served coldCooked chicken bound with mayonnaise should be dressed cold and returned to the refrigerator until serving. Do not hold it at room temperature for more than two hours.
Chicken salad in this form — diced cold poultry and celery under a mayonnaise-type dressing — was well established in American cooking by the late nineteenth century, and it appears in many household manuals of the era for a practical reason: it is what you did with the remains of a roast fowl. Note that this entry is written as a template rather than a dish, with veal, salmon and tuna offered as substitutes; canned tuna was still a relatively new grocery item in the early twentieth century. The Metropolitan Cook Book was published by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and distributed to policyholders as part of a broader corporate interest in domestic nutrition, which is consistent with the brisk, instructional tone and the assumption that basic dressings are made and kept on hand.