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Cream Dressing (Tablespoons vinegar)
2 tablespoons vinegar.
Few drops onion juice or 1 teaspoon finely chopped chives. 1½ cups thick cream.
PROCESS: Mash and rub the egg yolks through a sieve, add seasonings (except cayenne), then vinegar and chives. Whip cream until stiff, and add a little at a time to first mixture, beating constantly. When all is used, sprinkle in a few grains cayenne or paprika.
The page as printed is missing the head of its ingredient list — the yolks, salt, mustard and cayenne are named only in the method. Read it as a hard-cooked-egg cream dressing, the standard alternative to mayonnaise in American cookbooks of this period.
- The missing ingredientsThe process calls for egg yolks, "seasonings" and cayenne that never appear in the list. The printed quantities are only partial: the number of yolks and the make-up of the "seasonings" cannot be recovered from this page, though salt and dry mustard are the usual candidates in dressings of this kind.
- The yolks are cooked"Mash and rub the egg yolks through a sieve" only makes sense with hard-cooked yolks; raw ones would not need sieving. Cook the eggs through, cool them, and press the yolks through a fine sieve so no lumps survive into the finished cream.
- Thick creamThis means heavy or double cream, 36 percent fat or higher, which will whip stiff. Modern "whipping cream" at 30 percent works but gives a looser dressing; ultra-pasteurised cream whips more slowly and holds less well.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirThe hinge: add the cream gradually -- The whipped cream goes into the yolk paste a little at a time, and the recipe directs beating constantly as it goes, so this is beating in rather than folding. Added too fast, the mixture thins. The vinegar should be fully mixed into the yolks before any cream goes near it.
- VinegarThe recipe does not say which vinegar; cider vinegar was common in American kitchens of this date, and white wine vinegar is a reasonable modern substitute. Two tablespoons in a cup and a half of cream is a mild dressing -- taste the yolk base before the cream goes in, since you cannot correct it afterwards.
- Onion juiceMade by halving an onion and scraping the cut face against a grater or pressing it in a garlic press. A few drops is right; more will thin the base and make the dressing sharp.
- Yield and timingA cup and a half of cream whipped stiff roughly doubles in volume, so the finished dressing runs well over two cups. It will not hold: make it shortly before serving and keep it cold, as it slackens as it stands.
- What to put it onIntended for crisp salads — lettuce hearts, sliced tomato, cold asparagus, or a moulded vegetable salad. It is too rich and too soft to bind a chopped chicken or potato salad.
Cream dressings like this one occupied the ground between boiled dressing and mayonnaise in American cooking before the First World War. Bottled mayonnaise was not yet a pantry staple, and hand-emulsifying oil into raw yolk was a nuisance, so cooks reached instead for sieved hard-cooked yolk loosened with vinegar and lightened with whipped cream s no emulsion to break, no oil to buy, and a result light enough for the delicate lettuce-and-fruit salads that were fashionable at the time. 52 Sunday Dinners was published in 1913 by Elizabeth O. Hiller under the sponsorship of a cornstarch manufacturer, and it is organised as a year of complete Sunday menus; a dressing like this appears not as a standalone recipe but as one component of a menu, which may account for the incomplete ingredient list that arrives here. The reliance on cayenne or paprika as a finishing sprinkle rather than a stirred-in seasoning is characteristic of the period, when paprika in particular was prized as much for the colour it gave a pale sauce as for its flavour.