Chicken Salad
One quart of chicken, one pint of celery; season with two tablespoonfuls vinegar, one tablespoonful olive oil, teaspoonful of salt, and a little pepper. Set away in a cold place two or three hours.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in turn-of-the-century books: the cook is expected to know that this is the marinade stage, not the finished salad. Everything hinges on that.
- What a quart of chicken meansMeasures of meat here are by volume of cut pieces, not weight. A quart of diced cooked chicken works out at roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of picked meat, depending on how finely it is cut -- well within the yield of a single roasting fowl.
- The celeryOne pint is about 2 cups of diced celery, four to six ribs. Cut it no larger than the chicken so the two carry the dressing equally.
- This is a marinade, not the dressingThis may be a marinade rather than the dressing -- Two tablespoons vinegar to one of oil is sharp and thin for a finished salad dressing. Many books of the period seasoned and chilled the chicken as written, then bound it with mayonnaise or a boiled dressing just before serving; this recipe says nothing either way. Assembled and dressed hours ahead, the celery weeps and the salad turns watery.
- Chill timeTwo or three hours in "a cold place" means the refrigerator now.
- Poaching the birdIf you are cooking chicken for this, poach it gently and let it cool in its own liquid; meat pulled hot from the pot and cooled dry goes stringy. Save the broth.
- SeasoningA single teaspoon of salt for this much meat plus celery is modest. Taste again after any dressing goes in, since cold food reads as underseasoned.
- Yield and servingSix to eight servings. Serve on crisp lettuce, or between thin bread and butter for sandwiches.
Chicken salad became a fixture of American cold tables in the second half of the nineteenth century, and by 1900 nearly every general cookbook carried a version, usually filed with the salads and often recommended for luncheons, church suppers and receptions where food had to stand. Its rise tracks the rise of celery, which American market gardeners were growing in quantity by the 1880s and which supplied the crunch and the faint bitterness that plain poached fowl lacks. A Rhode Island market is often credited with the first commercial chicken salad in the 1860s, though the claim is traditional rather than documented. The brevity here is characteristic of the period: the writer gives little beyond the proportions and the chilling.