1 teaspoonful pepper.
1 teaspoonful Worcestershire sauce.
Remove from the chicken every bit of fat and skin. Cut the best portions of the meat into dice with a sharp knife. Chopping is apt to make it ragged and uneven in appearance. Cut the celery in like manner, and set both aside in a cool place, when you have strewed a little salt over the chicken. To the boiling water add the corn-starch, and boil fast until it thickens well. Then stir in the chicken-essence, skimmed from the top of the cold liquor in which the fowls were boiled. If the pot is clean, it will be of a fine golden color. Take from the fire, and begin to whip into the sauce the beaten eggs. Continue this until the mixture is nearly cold. Rub the hard-boiled yolks to a fine powder in a Wedgewood mortar or earthenware bowl; add the mustard, sugar, pepper, and salt; the Worcestershire sauce; then, a few drops at a time, the oil, lastly, also gradually, the vinegar. Strain through a wire sieve, or coarse tartelane, rubbing through all that will pass the net. Put the chicken and celery together in a glass salad-dish, and wet up with half of the vinegar mixture. Be careful not to do more than moisten it well, tossing up lightly with a silver fork. Then beat the rest of the vinegar sauce into the thicker mixture, which should by this time be perfectly cold. Pour over the salad; ornament the centre of the dish with flower-cups made of the hollowed halves of the whites of boiled eggs, with celery-tufts for petals. Lay a chain of sliced whites nearer the edge of the bowl, with a tender-celery leaf in each link, and set in a very cold place until wanted.
In obedience to this last injunction, I once left my salad on the shelf of a “very cold” pantry, until it was slightly frozen all through—a misadventure I did not suspect until it came to table. With a desperate attempt at facetiousness, I introduced the compound as a novelty—“a salade glacée”—and, to my relief and surprise, found in the accident a parallel to the “Irish blackguard” snuff story. The spoiled dish was pronounced by all far more delightful than the usual form of salad. I do not advise a repetition of the adventure on the part of any of my readers. Perhaps other guests might be less complaisant and flattering. It is hardly worth while to risk a cut glass dish on the chances of success.
Use the liquor in which the chickens were boiled for soup.
Cream Dressing for Salad.
1 cup sweet cream. It must be perfectly fresh.
1 table-spoonful corn-starch, or very fine flour.
Whites of two eggs, beaten stiff.
3 table-spoonfuls vinegar.