Home › Salads › Chicken for the Salad
Chicken for the Salad
If, when the chicken or fowl is cooked for salad, it is allowed to cool in the water in which it is boiled, it will be juicier and more tender than if taken from the water as soon as done. Place on a board and cut in long, thin strips, and cut these into dice; place in an earthen bowl three pints of chicken, and season with one tablespoonful of vinegar, two of oil, one teaspoonful of salt and a little pepper; set away in a cold place for two or three hours; scrape and wash enough of the tender white celery to make one quart, cut this with a sharp knife in pieces quite small. Put these in ice chest until serving time.
Use any of the salad dressings you may prefer.
This is the preparation stage for a chicken salad rather than a finished salad — the book leaves the dressing to your preference. Two things carry it: the way the bird is cooled, and the two-hour marinade that seasons the meat before any dressing touches it.
- The hinge: cool the meat in its brothPoultry lifted straight from the pot loses moisture as the hot fibers contract and steam off. Letting it come down in the cooking liquid is still standard practice for cold chicken and is the single instruction worth keeping. Do it safely, though — see below.
- Cool it in the refrigerator, not the kitchenA whole fowl sitting in warm broth on the counter passes hours in the range where bacteria multiply. Cool the pot in a sink of ice water until it is merely warm, then refrigerate it, still submerged, and finish cooling there.
- Three pints of chickenThat is 6 cups diced, roughly the picked meat of one 4 to 5 lb bird. "Fowl" in period usage meant an older laying hen, tougher and far more flavorful in broth than a modern roaster; a large stewing hen or a whole chicken simmered gently is the nearest thing.
- Earthen bowlThe point is a non-reactive vessel. Vinegar in a tin or unlined copper bowl picks up metal; glass, glazed pottery or stainless steel all do the job.
- The marinade is not the dressingOne tablespoon vinegar, two of oil, salt and pepper on six cups of meat is deliberately sparse — it seasons the chicken through rather than coating it. Add the mayonnaise or boiled dressing only at serving, or the salad weeps.
- A quart of celeryMeasured after cutting, that is the tender pale inner ribs of a large head, or more. Celery of the period was commonly blanched by banking soil around it, which likely accounts for "scrape and wash"; supermarket celery needs only trimming and a peel of the coarse strings on the outer ribs.
- Ice chestAn icebox ran warmer and damper than a modern refrigerator. Keep the celery in cold water or a covered box in the refrigerator so it stays crisp.
- YieldSix cups of chicken to four of celery, dressed, serves eight to ten as a luncheon salad.
Chicken salad in this form — cold diced fowl, celery, and a thick dressing — appeared in American cookbooks well before the end of the nineteenth century, and it was fixed enough by then that a book could print the chicken and the celery as one entry and leave the dressing to a cross-reference. The pairing depended on celery becoming cheap and reliable: the blanched, mild-flavored kinds spread through American market gardens over the course of the century, and celery was fashionable enough to be served on its own in cut-glass vases at table. The instruction to cool the bird in its liquor points to the other half of the period's kitchen logic, which is that a boiled fowl could produce two dishes — the meat for the salad and the broth for soup — and nothing was often lifted out early if it could be helped.