Mixing Old and New

I haven't done much historic cookery lately, because it's been very hot here.  I suspect that, in Viking times, people would have simply eaten bread and cheese on a hot day, but my husband won't eat cheese.  But he will eat chicken salad, a much more recently invented dish, so I've been playing with chicken salad recipes again.

Our current favorite recipe is from About.com's Southern Food site, where I found a simple, spicy recipe called "Cajun Chicken Salad with Pecans." The novel ingredients in this concoction are finely chopped pecans and a quarter-teaspoon of Tabasco sauce. My husband, who is inordinately fond of hot sauce in general and Tabasco in particular, raved about the results.

When it was time to make up a second batch, he wanted to replace the green onions in the recipe with leeks. Now leeks are about as un-Cajun as you can get, being an old world plant that likely did feature in Viking era cuisine, if not necessarily in Scandinavia.

On the other hand, leeks have a mild oniony flavor that's not all that different from green onions, so I figured the substitution would work just fine. We tried it last night, and the result's just as good as the original recipe. I bet that any mild onion would work--maybe I'll track down some Vidalias for the purpose.

All of this just goes to show how wonderful it is to be able to visit your area supermarket, collect ingredients from two different continents and whip up an interesting multicultural experiment for dinner.

Chicken Salad

We are now in the very middle of summer.  The weather is routinely hot, and very humid even when it isn't hot, so that any exertion tends to make one feel hotter than it would if the weather were cooler or drier.   So I have been short on inspiration to explore historic cuisine, and motivated to find some food that I can make in quantity that will not require cooking or need to be eaten hot. 

In exploring this issue with my husband, I found that he likes chicken salad, so I set out to find a chicken salad recipe we would both enjoy.  Naturally, there are hundreds of recipes on the Internet.  Eventually, we settled on this one for my first foray into chicken-salad making. I bought a four-pound rotisserie chicken to dismember for the cause; it provided enough chicken that I was able to make four times the amount specified in the recipe.  It was an instant success, though my husband thinks it might benefit from a bit of ginger.  That's definitely something to think about.

As always, I wonder about the history of the foods I choose to eat.  Surprisingly, the maintainter of the Food Timeline doesn't have anything to say about mayonnaise-based chicken salads such as mine; she only mentions a fashion for Chinese chicken salad that seems to have arisen in the 1930s.  Wikipedia led me to this article which suggests that the style of chicken salad I enjoyed tonight was first devised late in the Victorian period, which makes much more sense to me.

More interestingly, this website claims that chicken salad was invented at the Russian court in the late 18th century.  This article claims that the first chicken salad, called Salat Oliviye, was featured in Russian zakuska--a meal consisting of many appetizer-like foods that would be similar to the Spanish tapas if the dishes were lighter. Part of the attraction of Salat Oliviye was that it was made with mayonnaise, a French culinary innovation which was new at that time.

The article gives a recipe for Salat Oliviye that is in some ways similar to the "southern-style" chicken salad I made tonight; along with the chicken and mayonnaise it features dill pickle relish and hard-boiled eggs. However, unlike the recipe I used, Salat Oliviye also includes potatoes, capers, tomatoes and olives. Since I don't like capers and olives, and my husband doesn't like tomatoes, I'll probably be sticking with my lighter, simpler recipe.

EDIT:  My husband said that zakuska is more like the Scandinavian smörgåsbord. I didn't know whether that was the case, so I did some checking. It turns out that both zakuska and smörgåsbord are laid out all at once, like a buffet, so I guess he's right.  Tapas is used to describe a meal made from many appetizers, but tapas consists of small hot dishes, instead of cold ones. Also, tapas are generally charged for by the dish, and systems are implemented so the bar or restaurant serving them can keep track of how many of them a diner has eaten, so it's more like dim sum than like zakuska or smörgåsbord.