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French Dressing No 2
1/4 teaspoon salt. 1/4 teaspoon paprika.
Few grains cayenne. 6 tablespoons olive oil. 2 tablespoons lemon juice or 1 tablespoon Tarragon vinegar and 1 of lemon juice.
PROCESS: Put dry ingredients in bowl, add oil, mix well, then add lemon juice slowly while stirring constantly. Chill thoroughly and use on Fruit Salad.
A plain 3:1 vinaigrette, sharpened with lemon rather than built on vinegar alone. Nothing here has gone out of date, but a few habits of 1913 are worth translating.
- YieldSix tablespoons oil plus two of acid gives about half a cup, enough to dress a fruit salad for four to six. Fresh lemon juice fades, so it is best made the day you serve it.
- The order mattersThe dry seasonings go into the bowl and take the oil first, then the acid is added slowly with constant stirring, which disperses the seasoning through the oil before the mixture thickens.
- Paprika, 1913 stylePaprika -- the paprika called for in a book of this period would have been a mild sweet paprika, used largely for colour. Smoked paprika, though long made in Spain, is a quite different flavour and will overwhelm a fruit salad; use plain sweet.
- Cayenne"Few grains" means what it says -- a pinch smaller than you would measure. On fruit it should register as warmth at the back of the palate, not heat.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and easy enough to make by steeping fresh tarragon in white wine vinegar for a week or two. The half-and-half version with lemon is the better one for fruit; straight lemon can taste thin.
- Chilling and olive oilOlive oil clouds and thickens in a cold refrigerator, and a good deal of it will set semi-solid. Chill it, but pull it out ten minutes ahead and beat it again before it goes on the salad.
- It will separateThere is no mustard, egg or other emulsifier here, so this is a temporary emulsion by design. Whisk or shake it hard immediately before dressing.
- Dressing fruitAdd it at the table. Acid and salt draw juice out of cut fruit quickly, and a salad dressed even fifteen minutes early will sit in a pink puddle.
French dressing generally meant this for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: oil, acid, salt, pepper, mixed to order, though many nineteenth-century versions also carried mustard, onion juice or sugar. American cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s print it in a dozen small variations, numbered as here, and Fannie Farmer's treatment in the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book is similar, running roughly four tablespoons of oil to two of vinegar, with pepper rather than paprika and no lemon. The sweet, orange, tomato-thickened bottled product that took the name later in the century is a separate thing entirely. The lemon-and-tarragon version specified for fruit reflects a period enthusiasm for the fruit salad as a light course, which is often said to have appeared on American tables around the turn of the century as refrigeration and rail freight made out-of-season fruit more reliably available.