Italian Salad
Take all the white meat from a cold boiled chicken and cut in pieces, mix with it a half cupful of chopped boiled ham and marinate with French dressing; heap on a bed of lettuce and water-cress, pour mayonnaise over it, garnish with hard boiled eggs and diced pickled beets.
A cold composed salad of the kind that filled the buffet tables of the 1890s and 1900s. It assembles in minutes if the chicken is cooked ahead, and the only real decision is how long the meat sits in the dressing.
- The hinge: marinate, then drainThe recipe does not say how long to marinate; something like 20-30 minutes in the French dressing is enough to stop the meat tasting like plain boiled chicken. Draining it before it goes on the greens keeps the oil from pooling under the lettuce and loosening the mayonnaise.
- French dressing here is vinaigretteIn this period the term means oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweetened orange bottled dressing that took the name later.
- QuantitiesA cold boiled chicken of 3-4 lb yields roughly 2 cups of white meat, which with the half cup of ham makes a lunch dish for about four. The dark meat need not be wasted -- it can go to hash or croquettes.
- Boiled chickenPoach a whole bird gently in salted water until the thigh reaches 165F, then cool it in its own liquid so the breast stays moist. Meat cooled on a plate goes dry and the marinade will not save it.
- The hamCooked hams of the period were often saltier than modern ones. Use a good unsmoked or lightly smoked cooked ham, and taste before adding salt to the dressing.
- MayonnaiseThe recipe says to pour the mayonnaise over the salad, so it wants a pourable consistency. Loosen commercial mayonnaise with a spoonful of lemon juice or cream.
- Pickled beetsDice them small and add at the last moment. Left sitting on the salad they will bleed pink into the mayonnaise.
- ServingEverything should be thoroughly cold, and the salad should be dressed at the table or immediately before it goes out; watercress wilts fast under mayonnaise.
Salads built on cold cooked poultry bound or masked with mayonnaise were a long-standing fixture of American cookbooks through the nineteenth century. The name "Italian" attaches loosely to a great many nineteenth-century dishes and is often said to signal nothing more than olive oil, a vinegar dressing, or a garnish of something pickled -- no particular Italian dish need lie behind it, and cookbooks of the period seem to have applied the label with a free hand. What the recipe really shows is the economy of a large kitchen: a boiled fowl and the end of a ham become a company dish, and the composition, with its heaped centre, bed of greens and ring of egg and beet, follows the era's taste for salads arranged to be looked at before they are eaten.