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Relish Dressing
1 teaspoon mustard. 1 1/2 teaspoons salt. 1/2 tablespoon flour. 1 tablespoon sugar. Few grains cayenne. 1 tablespoon melted butter. 1 egg yolk. 1/3 cup hot vinegar. 1/2 teaspoon celery seed, 2/3 cup thick cream.
PRCCESS: Mix the ingredients, except celery seed, in the order given. Cook in double boiler, stirring constantly until mixture coats the spoon; strain and add celery seed. Chill and add to cabbage.
This is a cooked ("boiled") dressing of the sort that preceded bottled mayonnaise on the American table — thickened with egg yolk rather than emulsified with oil. It comes together in about ten minutes and the only real risk is scrambling the yolk.
- The hinge: temper, then never rush the heatThe hot vinegar goes into the butter and yolk in a thin stream while you whisk, not all at once, or the yolk sets on contact. Keep the water in the lower pan at a bare simmer and do not let it touch the bottom of the upper pan.
- "Coats the spoon"That means a thin custard, somewhere around 170-180F, which leaves a film on the back of a spoon that a fingertip parts cleanly. It will look thinner than you expect while hot and will set noticeably as it chills.
- Thick creamThis almost certainly meant the richest cream available, comparable to modern heavy cream, though period grades were not standardised. Use modern heavy or whipping cream, unwhipped; half-and-half will not thicken properly and light cream is more likely to curdle against the vinegar.
- Vinegar strengthVinegar strength was not standardised in this period and cannot be assumed equal to today's 5 percent. Start with the 1/3 cup called for, and if the finished dressing is sharp, cut it with a spoonful of cream rather than adding sugar unless you want a sweet slaw.
- No salt in the listThe original lists no salt at all, and gives no indication where it was expected to come from. Add about 1/2 teaspoon salt with the other ingredients; the dressing is flat without it.
- Straining is not optionalEven a careful cook gets a few threads of set yolk. Pour it through a fine sieve while warm, then stir in the celery seed so the seeds stay whole and visible.
- Yield and useAbout one cup, enough for a medium head of cabbage shredded fine (roughly 1 1/2 lb), serving six to eight. Dress the cabbage shortly before serving; the salt in the dressing draws water and the slaw slackens within an hour.
- KeepingTreat it as a fresh custard — cover and refrigerate, use within two or three days. It will thicken in the cold and can be loosened with a spoonful of cream.
Cooked dressings like this one were common in American salad-making through the later nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, until commercial mayonnaise became cheap and widely available in the 1920s and 30s. Cream, egg and vinegar thickened over water needed no oil emulsion to fuss over, and it suited sturdy vegetables — cabbage, celery, cold potatoes. The celery seed here is doing the work celery itself would do; dried seed was a cheap pantry staple that carried a green, slightly bitter note. 52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was compiled by Elizabeth O. Hiller, a Chicago cooking-school teacher, and its recipes are written in the clipped "Process:" style of the domestic-science movement, which assumed a reader trained to know what a double boiler and a spoon-coating custard looked like.