Today I’m going to be demonstrating a simple and refreshing chicken salad right out of
the 18th century.
Thanks for joining us today on 18th Century Cooking.
Today’s recipe is called a French Salad and it comes from Maria Rundell’s 1808 cookbook,
“A New System of Domestic Cookery”.
I know, 1808, now that’s the early 19th century isn’t it, but it turns out that
this is very similar to a number of different 18th century recipes for salad.
Salads have been around for hundreds of years, even thousands of years.
We know that the Romans had salads and especially in the 17th and 18th century, the French and
Italians were known for their salads.
Now the salads, this one’s called a French salad, and that’s quite likely because the
English were so fond of French cooking and in fact they imported French cooks to cook
for them and so salads were kind of known as a French dish in the English culture.
In the 18th century, salads took on many different forms.
Of course, they had their cabbages and their lettuces.
In fact, today we know this as Romain lettuce, in the 18th century it was just Roman lettuce.
They also had a variety of vegetables.
Endive, radish tops, leeks, and green onions were commonly used.
Some vegetable salads were raw and some were cooked or even boiled.
Other salads used meats or pickled fish.
They also used herbs in their salads, not just as accents, but as major ingredients.
Things where we might never put into a salad.
Now many people think of flowers in a salad as a new thing, but in fact in the 18th century,
flowers were very common in salads.
They had periwinkle and violets, nasturtium, those were all in 18th century salad recipes.
Sometimes they were fresh and other times they might be candied.
They were favored for, not only their color, but their flavor also.
Ivy did a video a year ago on how to candy violets.
If you haven’t seen that video, I invite you to watch it.
I’ll make sure to put a link down in the description of this video.
Now what we’re making today is a meat salad.
Now the common element that seems to tie all these kinds of salads together was the dressing
which was usually some kind of vinaigrette and that’s where we’re going to start.
I’m going to mince 2 or 3 anchovies and put those in a large bowl, mix them with 1
chopped shallot and about ¾ of a cup of chopped parsley. The recipe calls for oil, about a
tablespoon of oil and I’m using olive oil here. Now occasionally they would have used,
say an almond oil also in an 18th century recipe like this and that might be an interesting
variation you could try. So now let’s add the acid. We need about
twice as much acid. The recipe calls just for vinegar. Now likely what they mean is
a malt vinegar in the time period. I’m not using malt vinegar today, but actually half
lemon juice, about 2 tablespoons, and half distilled vinegar. To this I’ll add a teaspoon
of, say the mustard of my choice, along with a little bit of salt, a little bit of pepper
and I’m going to whisk this together.
Now it’s time for the meat. I have here some roasted chicken. It’s about ¾ of a
pound that I had from earlier. It’s completely cooled and I can start to add this to our
vinaigrette. This needs to be covered and set aside for about 3 hours so that the flavors
can blend. I suggest you store it in a cool place like your refrigerator.
So, let’s give this a try.
Mmm, wonderful blend of flavors. They’re all right there. You can get a little bit
of that lemon juice, but it’s not overpowering and it works so well with that oil. It all
blends together so well and those flavors are just boom, they’re just right there.
So this one is really good and they likely would have served this over toast or, you
know, in a modern context this would go really good on a croissant although they didn’t
have anything quite like that in the 18th century, but still, and you could just eat
it just like this, just right out of a bowl. It is great.
Well, there you have it, a delightful 18th century chicken salad. Really good, very simple.
You should try this one out. You know, I really want to encourage you to share this video.
If you enjoyed it please share it on Facebook or the social network of your choice. Whenever
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you for coming along as we try out these really interesting recipes from history, as we savor
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