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Salad Dressing Without Oil
One egg beaten light, one small teaspoonful of mustard, one tablespoonful vinegar, pepper and salt to taste, two tablespoonfuls of butter. Cook over hot water till thick, then put into a bowl and stir in half a bowlful of whipped cream. Set on ice. -Mrs. E. A. Boice.
A cooked egg-and-butter dressing lightened with whipped cream — the American "boiled dressing" that stood in for mayonnaise in households that thought salad oil coarse or expensive. It is easy to make and easy to scramble.
- The hinge: gentle heatCook in a bowl or the top of a double boiler over barely simmering water, whisking constantly, until the mixture coats the whisk like thin custard. If the water boils hard the egg sets in threads and no amount of stirring will smooth it; a thermometer reading of about 170F is the outer limit.
- "Mustard" means powder"Mustard" most likely means dry mustard powder rather than prepared jarred mustard, though prepared mustard was also on the market; English mustard powder is a close match and supplies most of the bite here.
- "Half a bowlful of whipped cream"Genuinely vague. The base as written yields roughly a third of a cup, so something like a cup of whipped cream gives a dressing that is rich but still pourable; less cream gives a sharper, more sauce-like result. The recipe stirs the cream into the cooked base and then sets the whole on ice; letting the base cool first will help keep the cream from slackening.
- Butter quantityTwo tablespoonfuls of butter to one egg is what does the work oil would have done. Use unsalted and season at the end, since the recipe already calls for salt to taste.
- Cool before foldingCooling -- "Set on ice" is the period instruction for chilling on or over ice. As written the cream goes into the cooked base and the finished dressing is then set on ice; letting the base cool before the cream goes in reduces the risk of a soupy result.
- Yield and useRoughly one and a half to two cups depending on how much cream goes in, enough for a large bowl of shredded cabbage, a fruit salad, or a cold chicken or celery salad.
- KeepingAn egg-and-cream dressing with only a tablespoon of vinegar is not acidic enough to be a preserving medium. Refrigerate and use within two days; it will also separate slightly on standing and needs a stir.
Dressings "without oil" turn up often in American community cookbooks, and the reason is at least partly economic: good imported olive oil was expensive and domestic salad oils were often rancid or adulterated. Butter, eggs and cream were on hand, so cooks built a stovetop custard instead and folded cream through it — the same logic that produced the vinegar-and-egg boiled dressings still sold today as the sweeter, tangier cousin of mayonnaise. The attribution to Mrs. E. A. Boice is typical of the genre: these books were assembled from contributions by name, and the signature served as a credit to the contributor.