Mary Martha and the chicken salad
I made a chicken salad fit for an American debutante, but gave it a French accent. What have you done this week?
In my second year at university in a small, seaside town, I shared a flat with Mary Martha. She was clever, funny, always beautifully dressed, but walked on the backs of her soft leather loafers, pressing them flat into the sole.
Back home in Virginia, her father was a judge and her mother ran the lives of her six children and, at that point, two grandchildren, with brisk affection. Mary Martha was six feet tall. Whenever she found a boyfriend, her mother had two questions: Is he tall and is he Catholic?
“If we’re gonna get drunk, we might as well get healthy!”
The small kitchen in our stone terraced house was sparsely equipped, but we had a blender. I’ve no idea where it came from. One afternoon, the corner shop opposite us on Bridge Street had a pineapple in among the potatoes, turnips and browning bananas. Mary Martha came running back over the road clutching the pineapple and a bottle of cheap rum, rather in the manner of a star athlete entering the Olympic stadium with the torch. A mere ten minutes of excavating ice cubes from our fridge’s tiny freezer compartment with a butter knife and a quick whizz in the blender, et voilà, pineapple daiquiris of sorts. “If we’re gonna get drunk, we might as well get healthy!” she said, handing me a tumbler. I think of her every time I add a slice of lemon or a sprig of mint to a cocktail, which is often.
There were a lot of American students doing their junior year abroad at my university that year (though not as many as were drawn there later, by Prince William’s showing up, briefly, in the art history department). Sometimes, Mary Martha would have lunches for her compatriots – clear-skinned, multi-vitamin’d sorority sisters, or other girls from the University of Virginia as she was, or Sweet Briar College, Vanderbilt or Duke. Sometimes our gay friend would join us. He went to Hampden-Sydney College, a university so posh no one’s ever heard of it.
They discussed their weekend trips to Rome and Paris as casually as the rest of us talked about skipping to Edinburgh or London. We talked about art and boys and essay crises over salad and pasta. One day in Spring, Mary Martha served chicken salad – shredded chicken with grapes and nuts (probably walnuts as I doubt very much we could get pecans in East Fife in 1986) dressed in mayonnaise, on a bed of lettuce. There may also have been water chestnuts. I think it was the girl from Sweet Briar, the one who’d spent the summer hot air ballooning in the Loire Valley with her parents, who said, “Mary Martha, I think you must have been to lots of debutante lunches last summer?” Back then this Southern staple was, apparently, a great hit with the cotillion crowd. Who knows? Perhaps it still is, if such a thing still exists.
All these years later, I still make a version of Mary Martha’s chicken salad. It makes a wonderful lunch in summer, and is a great dish to take to a party if you’re asked to bring something. I know you’re here for French stuff, so I put some tarragon in it. Vive la France, and all that.
Chicken salad fit for a debutante
I most often use poached chicken for this (see How to poach a chicken, below), though you can certainly use leftover roast or barbecued chicken if you have it. I never have any leftover roast or barbecued chicken.
Serves 4 for lunch, or more as part of a bigger meal
For the dressing
3 tbsp mayonnaise, 70g
3 tbsp Greek yoghurt, 70g
1 tsp Dijon mustard
Finely grated zest of an unwaxed lemon – be careful not to remove any of the bitter white pith
Juice of ½ small lemon
A small bunch of parsley, leaves and fine stems only, about 10g, chopped
About 20 tarragon leaves, roughly chopped
Salt and freshly-ground black pepper
For the salad
450g poached chicken, shredded into quite large pieces
200g seedless green grapes, halved
½ a cucumber, about 150g, halved, seeds scraped out, and cut into 2cm pieces
2 sticks of celery, about 120g, trimmed, and cut into 1cm pieces
60g pecans, toasted* and roughly chopped
To serve, a few Little Gem leaves dressed in a little olive oil and a sprinkling of flaky salt.
Tip: You can toast pecans in the oven at 180C/160C Fan/Gas 4 on an oven tray, for about 6-8 minutes until fragrant. Put a timer on. You think you’ll remember but you won’t. Alternatively, sauté them gently in a dry frying pan, rattling the pan frequently, until they smell toasted. However you cook them, tip them onto a plate to cool when they’re done as they will keep cooking if you leave them on the hot tray or in the pan, and that’s not what you want.
In a large bowl, whisk together all the ingredients for the dressing. Taste and season with salt and pepper – you want it to be well seasoned, as you’re mixing it through quite a lot of other ingredients.
Tip the salad ingredients into the bowl with the dressing and use two forks to mix everything very well, so everything is beautifully combined. Cover and leave for 30 minutes in a cool place for the flavours to develop. If you’re leaving it for longer than that – you can make it up to about 4 hours ahead – cover and refrigerate. In fact, you can make it a day ahead and refrigerate it, but if I do that, I add the pecans just before I serve it as they lose their crispness if they’re left in the dressing for too long.
Arrange some little Gem leaves lightly dressed in olive oil on a platter or on individual plates and spoon the salad over the top.
How to poach a chicken
Poached chicken has become the less glamorous sibling of roast or barbecued chicken, probably because we are so rightly enamoured of the crisp seduction of perfectly cooked skin. But you know, I never regret poaching a chicken. It requires very little effort, results in the most beautifully tender (moist, you can’t make me say moist) meat ready to be used in salads, sandwiches, wraps, pies and soups. You also get the added bonus of beautiful stock. You can poach your bird with minimal aromatics – just a few vegetables and herbs, some peppercorns and a bit of salt – but this is how I usually poach mine…
1 chicken
2 tbsp miso paste, dissolved in a little hot water, you don’t absolutely need this, but if you don’t use it, pay extra attention to the rest of the seasoning
2 carrots, scrubbed and cut into big chunks
2 celery, cut into big chunks
1 small onion, halved
5-6 garlic cloves, no need to peel them
1 piece of ginger, about the size of a thumb, no need to peel it, just slice it
Juice of a lemon or 1 tbsp cider vinegar
3-4 bay leaves
Some herbs – today, I just used the thick stalks from the parsley and tarragon stems from the herbs I used in the recipe, but you can use almost anything you have, some thyme sprigs, a little oregano or sage, some rosemary
1 tbsp peppercorns
1 tsp salt
Put the chicken in a large saucepan with all of the other ingredients. Fill the pan with enough cold water to cover the chicken. Bring to a gentle simmer and skim off any scum that rises to the surface. Continue to simmer very gently for 1 hour 20 minutes.
Do not let it boil, and if the water no longer covers the chicken, top it up with a little boiling water from the kettle.
Carefully lift the chicken from the pot (I use two huge metal spoons to do this) and into a colander over a large bowl. When you pierce the thickest part of the thigh with a sharp knife, the juices should run clear. Alternatively, if you have an instant read thermometer, it should read 71C when you push it into the thigh. If it’s not cooked, put it back in the pan and test again in 10 minutes. When the chicken is cooked, place it in the colander and let the liquid drip into the bowl beneath. If you’re serving it straight away, cover it with foil and let it rest for 20 minutes. If you’re using it for another recipe, let it cool completely before breaking it down into large pieces.
At this point, having taken the meat off the bone, I put everything – skin, bones – back in the stock pan and let the stock simmer away very gently for a further hour or so to concentrate the flavour. When it’s ready, I pass it through a fine sieve and discard the bones and stock vegetables. Let it cool and then refrigerate it for up to 5 days (when the fat rises to the top and solidifies, you can retrieve it and use it for frying. It’s delicious). Alternatively, freeze it for up to 3 months.
Market haul, 11 June, 2024
This week’s market haul comprises: apricots, cherries, grapes, celery, little gem lettuces, a boule of wholegrain bread, another geranium (pelargonium), a chicken and a free carcass (comme cadeau, for buying the eggs and the chicken), free parsley from the vegetable stall, a red pepper, tomatoes, green beans, avocados, thirteen eggs, as is traditional.
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Can you please track down Mary Martha and invite her to your next birthday please.?She sounds fun and would fit in just fine I reckon...especially on the cocktail station. Looking forward to it...
You always write in such a welcoming and open way....it makes me feel as if we're chatting directly to one another..... something about this piece is even more evocative of your past than usual and it literally makes me want to jump out of bed and poach a chicken..... Thank YOU for the constant inspiration and glimpse into your life. I'm afraid I find the M word perfect on some occasions 😜😜. Enjoy your Sunday 🤗