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Salad Dressing (Yolks of three hard-boiled)
Yolks of three hard-boiled eggs, two tablespoonfuls powdered sugar, one dessertspoonful olive oil, one teaspoonful of salt, one dessertspoonful of mixed mustard.
Mash all fine; mix thoroughly; then add three tablespoonfuls of cider vinegar. A little dust of cayenne pepper adds to the flavor. -Mrs. Horace Fletcher.
Five tablespoonfuls oil.
Half pint strong vinegar.
A cooked-yolk dressing of the sort that filled American cookbooks before jarred mayonnaise. It is quick, but the wording at the end needs untangling before you start.
- The trailing line is a separate note"Five tablespoonfuls oil. Half pint strong vinegar" sits outside the recipe proper and does not match the quantities above. It reads as either an alternate, oilier version or a printer's leftover from a neighbouring recipe. Work from the first set of measurements and ignore the tail, or treat it as a much richer variant made in bulk.
- DessertspoonfulTwo teaspoons, midway between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. So the dressing as written has about 2 teaspoons oil and 2 teaspoons mustard.
- Mixed mustardPrepared mustard, meaning mustard powder already slaked with vinegar or water, not dry mustard from the tin. Any smooth yellow or English-style prepared mustard works.
- Powdered sugarIn this period usually fine-ground granulated rather than modern confectioners' sugar with its cornstarch. Caster sugar is the closest match; ordinary granulated dissolves fine once the vinegar goes in.
- Sieve the yolksMashing with a fork leaves grit. Push the hard-boiled yolks through a fine sieve first, then work in the oil and mustard to a paste before the vinegar, or the dressing will separate into flecks.
- Taste before you commit to the saltA full teaspoon of salt against three egg yolks is heavy by current palates, especially with only three tablespoons of vinegar to carry it. Add half, then adjust.
- Yield and keepingRoughly half a cup, enough for a head of lettuce or a bowl of cold potatoes or cold chicken. It is a cooked-egg preparation with vinegar, so refrigerate and use within two or three days.
Before commercial mayonnaise reached grocery shelves, the everyday American salad dressing was built on hard-boiled yolks rather than raw ones: cheaper, stable, and forgiving of a cook with no whisk arm and no cold marble slab. Olive oil is often said to have been an imported specialty in many late nineteenth-century households, which may help explain why a recipe like this uses two teaspoons of it where a French dressing would use half a cup, and leans instead on mustard, sugar and vinegar for body and bite cthough the recipe's own trailing "five tablespoonfuls oil" complicates the picture. The sharp-sweet balance here \— sugar and cider vinegar together — is characteristic of the boiled and cooked dressings common on Midwestern and New England tables well into the twentieth century, and that survive today in coleslaw and potato salad. Contributed recipes signed with a married name, as this one is, were the backbone of community and subscription cookbooks of the era, though the identity behind such names is rarely documented.