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Boiled Salad Dressing
1¼ cup butter. 1/4 teaspoons salt. 1 teaspoon mustard. 1/4 teaspoon paprika. 1 tablespoon sugar.
Yolks 4 eggs. 2 tablespoons flour. 1/4 cup vinegar diluted with 2 tablespoons water. 1 cup cream.
PROCESS: Melt butter in sauce-pan; add flour mixed with seasonings, add egg yolks slightly beaten and vinegar and water. Cook over hot water until mixture thickens. Cool. Whip cream and fold into mixture. Beat well, chill and serve with potato salad.
A cooked egg-and-flour dressing lightened with whipped cream — the standard American alternative to mayonnaise before jarred mayonnaise was on every shelf. It is straightforward, but it lives or dies by heat control.
- The hinge: gentle heat"Cook over hot water" means a double boiler or a bowl set over barely simmering water, never direct heat. Stir constantly and pull it off when it coats a spoon, around 175F; past that the yolks scramble and the dressing turns grainy.
- Mustard means powder"1 teaspoon mustard" in a recipe of this type is most likely dry mustard powder rather than prepared jarred mustard. Sift it in with the flour and seasonings as directed so it disperses without lumps.
- The salt figure is garbled"1/4 teaspoons salt" is almost certainly a typographical slip. A quarter teaspoon is thin for two cups of dressing; season to taste after cooking, working up toward a scant teaspoon.
- Cream"Cream" here means cream rich enough to whip; the thin or light creams sold today will not hold a whip. Whip only to soft peaks so it folds in without deflating.
- Vinegar strengthPeriod vinegar, especially home-made cider vinegar, varied in strength and cannot be assumed equivalent to today's standardised bottlings. The recipe already dilutes 1/4 cup vinegar with 2 tablespoons water; taste before adding more acid.
- Cool before foldingThe cooked base must be genuinely cold, not merely warm, or the whipped cream will melt into it and you lose the light texture the recipe is after. Chilling the base over an ice bath takes about fifteen minutes.
- Yield and keepingMakes rather more than two cups, since the whipped cream roughly doubles in volume before the base is folded in. The cream-lightened dressing can separate on standing, so use it within a day or two and rebeat lightly before serving.
Boiled dressings like this one were the everyday salad sauce in American households for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Flour and cooked egg yolk did the thickening work that oil does in mayonnaise, which mattered when good salad oil was expensive, unreliably fresh, and unfamiliar to many cooks, and when beating an emulsion by hand was a real labour. The result is tangier and less rich than mayonnaise, which is why it pairs so naturally with potato salad — the vinegar cuts the starch. Commercial jarred mayonnaise spread widely in the United States from the 1910s and 1920s onward and gradually displaced the type, though it survives in regional dishes such as Pennsylvania Dutch hot slaws and dressed lettuce. There is a seasonal logic to it too: cold potato salad was summer Sunday food, and a dressing you cook in the morning and chill is easier to manage in a hot kitchen than one you emulsify at the table.