Chicken Salad
1 chicken steamed and cut in strips, twice as much cabbage or celery as chicken, 3 eggs boiled and mashed, with 1 tablespoon butter, while hot; season well with pepper and salt, and add vinegar enough to make it moist.
(You can find the original recipe in the facsimile copy reproduced in Tom Kelchner’s new book The Story of the 1881 Cumberland Valley Cook and General Recipe Book)
Well, why not half cabbage and half celery? I used one chicken leg and one egg. I mashed the hot egg with butter, then I sliced an equivalent amount of vegetables and mixed it together.
The first version, I decided everything was too chunky, though the flavors were good. I added about 2 tablespoons of vinegar, but there’s no way that was going to attempt to hold this together.
I blitzed this in the food processor to make a more uniform, um, sandwich paste. This looked nice, but still wasn’t going to hold together. I was quite leery of adding more vinegar, so I dolloped some mayonnaise in there to get what reminds me of a more modern chicken salad.
No other reviews on this one, sorry.
Rating 3/5 stars. Not good, not bad, just average. The taste was good, if a little bland and heavy on the vegetables. I don’t know why they bothered with the hardboiled egg, because I couldn’t taste it at all and it did not improve the integrity of the chicken salad. I will admit that I tinkered with this recipe quite a bit, but it leaves me firmly convinced that mayonnaise is necessary for a good chicken salad.
– Rachael Zuch of Zuch Design