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Lettuce Dressing
-Mrs. F. Cottrill.
One saltspoonful of salt.
One raw egg. Half teaspoonful mustard.
A little sugar.
A little cayenne.
One-quarter teacup olive oil.
One tablespoonful of vinegar.
Mix thoroughly and do not put on the lettuce until ready to serve.
A plain oil-and-vinegar dressing at close to the standard 3:1 ratio, with dry mustard doing the work of holding it together. The only real technique here is in the last clause: dress the lettuce at the table, not in the kitchen.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. That is modest for this volume of dressing; taste and add more once it is mixed.
- Quarter teacupThe teacup was not a standardised measure; period sources put it anywhere from a gill (4 fl oz) to about 6 fl oz. On the larger reading a quarter teacup is roughly 3 tablespoons, which with 1 tablespoon of vinegar gives the familiar 3:1 oil-to-acid proportion; on the smaller reading it is nearer 2 tablespoons and a sharper 2:1.
- MustardMost likely dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard from a jar, though the recipe does not specify. Mustard also helps the oil and vinegar hold together briefly, as well as seasoning.
- Order of mixingThe original says only to mix thoroughly. If you want the seasonings evenly distributed, dissolve the salt, mustard, sugar and cayenne in the vinegar before adding the oil, since salt will not dissolve in oil.
- VinegarThe original does not specify. Cider vinegar was common in American kitchens of the period; white wine vinegar gives a cleaner result with olive oil.
- Why the timing mattersSalt and acid draw water out of lettuce leaves within minutes and collapse them. Dressing only at the moment of serving is the whole point of the instruction, and it holds as good practice today.
- YieldBetween about 3 tablespoons and a quarter cup, depending on how the teacup is read; enough for one head of leaf or Bibb lettuce.
Contributor recipes like this one — signed with a neighbor's name — were the backbone of community and "home" cookbooks in this period, and the same basic vinaigrette recurs in many of them with only small variations in the sugar and the cayenne. Its presence may signal a shift in American salad habits: through much of the nineteenth century leafy salads were more often dressed with a cooked or boiled dressing thickened with egg and cream, and imported olive oil was an expense many kitchens skipped. By the time this book was compiled, bottled olive oil was, it is generally said, widely available in cities, and the simple French-style dressing had become respectable enough to appear without explanation. The instruction to withhold the dressing until serving reflects the period's growing attention to crisp, raw greens rather than the heavily sauced or wilted salads of earlier decades.