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Lettuce Salad
Every vegetable salad should have a good paste. To make this requires care. Put the yolks of two boiled eggs into a dish with a teaspoonful of dry mustard and a tablespoonful of perfectly sweet olive oil, with enough pepper and salt to season. With a wooden spoon work this to a perfectly smooth paste. Then gradually add three tablespoonfuls more of oil, two of vinegar, and mix to the consistency of cream. Add two or three leaves of tarragon and a small eschalot, or one small white onion finely minced; also the whites of the two eggs cut in very small slices. Then add the lettuce and some water-cress, broken into inch pieces. When all is thoroughly mixed with the sauce, serve. We have given all the ingredients of a perfect lettuce salad. They may be all used or not, according to the taste. The French rub the dish in which it is sliced with garlic, but ours is not a garlic-eating nation.
This is a cooked-yolk dressing rather than a mayonnaise, so it forgives a heavy hand: the yolks are already set and cannot break the way raw ones do. The care the recipe asks for is all in the first stage.
- "A good paste"Paste here means the thick yolk-and-mustard base, not a modern pastry paste. Mash the two hard-boiled yolks with the mustard, the first tablespoon of oil and the seasoning until there is no grain left in it at all; any lumps at this point will stay lumps.
- Add the oil slowlyThe dry mustard and the cooked yolk are the emulsifiers. Dribble in the remaining three tablespoons of oil while working the paste, then loosen with the vinegar. Reversing the order gives a thin, separated dressing.
- "Perfectly sweet olive oil"Sweet means fresh and unrancid, not sweetened. Nineteenth-century olive oil went off quickly in the bottle, hence the warning; a decent current extra-virgin oil needs no comment.
- EschalotA shallot. One small shallot, or the small white onion offered as the alternative, minced as finely as you can manage so it seasons rather than crunches.
- TarragonTwo or three leaves only for a bowl of lettuce, and it is assertive. If you have only dried, use a pinch and let it sit in the vinegar for a few minutes first.
- ProportionsFour tablespoons oil to two of vinegar is a 2:1 dressing, sharper than most modern vinaigrettes at 3:1. Taste before you commit the greens and cut the vinegar back if it bites.
- Dress at the last momentThe dressing is thick enough to weigh the leaves down. Wash and dry the lettuce and cress thoroughly, since wet leaves will thin the sauce, and toss only as it goes to the table.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Roughly six tablespoons of dressing, which should be about enough for a head of lettuce and a bunch of watercress.
Cooked-yolk dressings of this kind were common in American cookbooks of the later nineteenth century, sitting between a plain oil-and-vinegar dressing and the raw-yolk mayonnaise associated with French cookery; the boiled yolk was more forgiving of an inexperienced hand. The tarragon, shallot and watercress point to French influence, and the closing remark that "ours is not a garlic-eating nation" is the period speaking plainly: garlic was often regarded in Anglo-American households as a foreign taste, tolerated as a rub on the bowl at most. "Eschalot" is a variant English spelling of shallot, found in cookbooks well into the twentieth century before the shorter form took over.