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French Dressing
Two teaspoonfuls mustard.
One teaspoonful salt.
Five tablespoonfuls oil. Half pint strong vinegar. Half teaspoonful pepper.
A little cayenne.
Four eggs well beaten.
Put vinegar on the stove in a kettle of hot water and let it come to a scald; add the rest of the ingredients and stir till it thickens.
A cooked egg dressing rather than the oil-and-vinegar vinaigrette the name suggests today. The ingredient list is incomplete as printed, so read it as a method to be fitted to a known quantity.
- The missing vinegarThe instructions call for vinegar but the list never gives an amount. Some period recipes for cooked egg dressings of this size use on the order of half a cup to a cup of cider or white wine vinegar; the original simply does not say, and any figure here is a guess rather than a conversion.
- "A kettle of hot water"This is a double boiler in all but name: the vinegar goes in a small pan or bowl set inside a larger vessel of simmering water. Direct heat on an acid-and-egg mixture will curdle it before it thickens.
- Scald, not boil"Come to a scald" means the vinegar is steaming and just short of a boil; by modern convention that is put at around 180F, though the recipe gives no figure. Boiling vinegar drives off aroma and makes the finished dressing harsh.
- Temper the eggsThe hinge of the recipe. Beat a little of the hot vinegar into the beaten eggs first, then return the whole to the pan over the water. Tipping cold eggs into hot acid in one go gives scrambled egg in vinegar.
- When it is doneStir constantly and pull it off when it coats the spoon and leaves a clean line when you draw a finger through, around 170-180F. It will thicken a little more as it cools; overcooked, it turns granular and cannot be brought back.
- MustardMost likely dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard from a jar, though the recipe does not say. Two teaspoonfuls of powder is assertive; slake it with a spoonful of the warm vinegar to a paste before it goes in.
- Yield and keepingWith the vinegar unstated the yield cannot be fixed; four eggs plus vinegar would give something on the order of a cup and a half of thick dressing, enough for a large bowl of potato, cabbage or cold chicken salad. Cover and refrigerate; use within three or four days, and thin with cream or a little more vinegar when it stiffens in the cold.
Before bottled dressings, "French dressing" was not a fixed formula in American household books, and the name attached to a range of things: sometimes a plain oil-and-vinegar dressing beaten with salt and pepper, sometimes, as here, a cooked egg dressing containing no oil at all. This version belongs to the older family of boiled or "salad cream" dressings, which may have suited kitchens where good salad oil was expensive, unreliable, or apt to go rancid in a warm larder, while eggs and cider vinegar were more readily at hand han anything the recipe itself tells us. The cayenne and dry mustard suggest, though the entry does not say so, a dressing meant for substantial cold dishes rather than delicate greens. The bright orange sweetened French dressing of later American menus is a twentieth-century commercial development and has nothing to do with the entry printed above.