Home › Salads › Old-Fashioned Chicken Salad and Dress
Old-Fashioned Chicken Salad and Dress
ING.
For one chicken or the white meat of three chickens, five eggs, three cooked and two raw, seven tablespoonfuls of olive oil, one teaspoonful of mustard, salt and pepper to taste; boil eggs twenty-one minutes; rub eggs to a smooth paste, add yolks of uncooked eggs well beaten, seven tablespoonfuls of olive oil, a little at a time, add mustard, pepper and salt, very little vinegar or lemon juice, more oil if needed; add seven olives and a teaspoonful of capers to the chicken and celery (of which use one-third as much celery as chicken); also, just before serving a half cupful of whipped cream may be added. The cream is a great improvement.
This is a cooked-yolk mayonnaise of the sort that stood between old boiled dressings and the whipped emulsion we know now, and the method rewards patience more than technique.
- The hinge: add the oil drop by dropThe three hard-cooked eggs, rubbed to a paste, give the base body and forgiveness, but the two raw yolks are what actually emulsify. Add the seven tablespoons of oil a few drops at a time until the mixture visibly thickens, then in a thin stream; poured fast it will break.
- Raw yolksNothing in this dressing is cooked after the raw yolks go in. Use pasteurized eggs in the shell or pasteurized yolks, keep the finished salad below 40F, and eat it the day it is made. The recipe's "very little vinegar or lemon juice" leaves the dressing barely acidic, so it offers little protection on that front.
- Twenty-one minutes for the eggsThat timing is a period habit, not a necessity, and it produces a grey-green ring at the yolk. Ten to twelve minutes off the boil gives yolks that mash to a smoother paste.
- "One chicken"A stewing fowl of the era often ran about 4 to 5 lb and yielded roughly 3 to 4 cups of picked meat. A poached 4 lb chicken is a reasonable equivalent; cut it in neat half-inch dice rather than shredding.
- Celery proportionOne-third as much celery as chicken by volume, so about 1 to 1 1/4 cups diced for a 4 lb bird. Use the inner ribs and chill them crisp before cutting.
- Olives and capersSeven olives most likely means whole green olives in brine; the recipe does not specify the type or say to slice them. The capers should be drained and, if salt-packed, rinsed. Both are seasoning here, so hold back on added salt until the dressing is finished.
- The whipped creamFold in the half cup of unsweetened whipped cream at the last moment, as directed. It lightens the dressing and mutes the mustard, but it also thins on standing, so a salad dressed early in the day should get its cream just before it goes to table.
- YieldEnough for six to eight as a luncheon salad, served on lettuce. The dressing alone comes to about a cup.
Chicken salad was one of the fixed points of the American ladies' luncheon, church supper and wedding breakfast through the second half of the nineteenth century, and by the time this book appeared it was old enough to be labelled "old-fashioned" on the page. What marks it as older is the dressing: a mayonnaise built on whole boiled eggs rubbed to a paste, with raw yolks added for emulsifying power, a steady method in a kitchen without refrigeration or a whisk-driven mixer. The olives and capers point to the same period taste that put them in chicken croquettes and creamed dishes, and the finishing spoonful of whipped cream, singled out as "a great improvement," was a common trick for softening a sharp mayonnaise into something closer to a Chantilly dressing.