Chicken Salad, General Francis E. Waters

The papers of caterer William Johnson, in the collections at the Maryland Center for History and Culture, offer a rare look at the finer details of the business of catering in the early 1900s. The documents aren’t extensive, but they include the purchase price of supplies like dishes and bottled water, the cost per person for catered meals, and names of people and organizations who hired Johnson’s services in 1912.

I viewed the collection a few years ago, taking notes on menus from different events ranging from wedding receptions and Thanksgiving dinners to afternoon card parties.

One dish, I noticed, appeared again and again, and it wasn’t Deviled Crab or terrapin stew or Chicken A La Maryland. It was chicken salad. Some deliveries, I noted, contained ONLY chicken salad.

Chicken salad may well have been Johnson’s specialty, but thereafter I took note of just how frequently chicken salad was served not just at lunch counters but at restaurants, hotels, and railroad cars.

A syndicated humor column in 1874 referred to chicken salad as “The National Beverage.”

As to how much variety existed among chicken salad recipes, I do not know. They tended to contain celery, which famously enjoyed a peculiar popularity in the 1800s. Hard-boiled eggs were usually involved. The dressing could be mayonnaise, a more tangy cooked dressing, or just oil. Recipes tend to use salt, pepper, paprika and —if you’re lucky— mustard as seasonings. This is where the uninitiated might assume this is an old-timey bland food thing but that’s not really the case. Cooks might use a seasoning blend like Kitchen Pepper or just know to season to taste

Frederick Philip Stieff included two chicken salad recipes in his 1932 collection “Eat, Drink & Be Merry in Maryland.” One is jellied into an aspic. I decided to make the other one. Contributed by General Francis E. Waters, who would have been 75 in 1932, his chicken salad recipe seemed like it would have hailed from the 19th century.

According to a biography in the 1907 “Men of Mark in Maryland,” Francis Waters’ father Richard T. Waters came from Virginia and got into the lumber business in Snow Hill, Maryland. Francis was born in 1856 and eventually came to run the Surry Lumber Company.

Stieff would have known Waters from any one of the exclusive clubs they partook in, but they also served together on a committee to present Maryland to the world at the World’s Fair Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904. Even outside of those things, they would have crossed paths in the busybody world of Baltimore’s well-to-do.

No prominent businessman at the turn of the century stuck solely to business, and of course Francis Waters was involved in banking and railroads. He was also a director of the Maryland Penitentiary.

The Governor of Maryland from 1900-1904, John Walter Smith, was also from Snow Hill. He appointed Waters to the position of Brigadier-General on his staff during his term.

In 1904, after the Great Baltimore Fire, Waters was a part of the committee that planned rebuilding. “Men of Mark in Maryland” annoyingly vaguely boasted that all of the committee’s recommendations were accepted “save one, and all men can now see that the committee was wise in that recommendation which was not accepted.” Upon further research, I believe they may be referring to Baltimore Street, which was one of the few downtown streets that was not widened.

Francis E. Waters died in 1936, a decade after his wife, Fannie Scott, who “represented the Puritan stock of New England” in contrast to Waters’ “Cavalier Stock of Virginia,” as stated by “Men of Mark.”

The Waters’ are buried in Green Mount Cemetery, along with three of their four children. Two preceded them in death. Margaret Winans Waters died in 1914 after a prolonged illness. More grimly, their son Richard Thomas Waters had health problems which prevented him from enlisting in 1918. This was cited as the reason he jumped from a window.

I did not include Francis E. Waters on my Culinary Tour of Green Mount last fall, mainly due to the location of the family plot in the southeastern section of the cemetery. If I ever do, perhaps I can find some estimate of how much of Virginia and North Carolina was deforested by the Surry Lumber Company.

Certainly I would discuss one of his other recipes, a simple preparation of terrapin that came with the warning “this receipt is intended only for first-class Chesapeake Bay Diamond Back terrapin.” It is fitting that he should share a recipe for such an iconic Maryland dish as terrapin alongside one that had so often served humbly as its accompaniment.

Recipe:

• 5 pounds chicken
• half as much celery
• 6 egg, hard-boiled
• paprika
• black pepper
• salt

Boil one 5-pound fat chicken. When cooked remove it from vessel and let the liquor in which it was cooked cool. Chop the
meat of the chicken fine, adding one-half as much celery as chicken.
Dressing: Use 6 hard-boiled eggs, remove the yolks and mash; skim the fat from the liquor in which the chicken was cooked, mix it carefully in the yolks of the eggs, season with salt, pepper, and paprika to taste. Mix dressing into the chicken and celery, garnish with the white of eggs, sliced.

Recipe from Eat, Drink & Be Merry In Maryland by Frederick Philip Stieff (1932)