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Onion Cocktail
2 cups diced apples, 1 cup diced onions, 1 cup seeded raisins. Fill cocktail glasses with onions, apples, raisins, pour over a sour dressing made as follows: 1/4 cup each of vinegar and water, 1 tablespoon Crisco, salt and red pepper to taste, and 2 teaspoons sugar. Place in small saucepan over fire until Crisco melts, then stir in well beaten yolks of 2 eggs, stirring constantly until thick. Place in ice box to cool before using.
A first-course salad served in glasses, dressed with a cooked egg-yolk dressing. The dressing is the only part that can go wrong.
- Keep the dressing below a simmerOnce the yolks go in, the vinegar-water mixture must thicken over gentle heat with constant stirring; if it boils, the yolks scramble and the dressing breaks. A double boiler or a heavy pan over low heat is the safer route, and bringing it to about 160-165F thickens it properly.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it. One tablespoon of vegetable shortening here is doing nothing that unsalted butter or a neutral oil will not do; use either.
- Red pepperIn this period that means cayenne, not paprika and not sweet peppers. A pinch is enough at this volume.
- Ice boxRefrigerate. The dressing needs to be fully cold before it goes over the fruit, or it will wilt the apple and onion.
- Choose the onion carefullyA cup of raw diced onion is assertive. Sweet varieties, or a mild white, diced small and rinsed in cold water, keep the dish edible as an appetiser rather than a dare.
- Cut the apples lastNo acid is called for on the fruit before dressing. Dice the apples immediately before assembling, or toss them in a little of the vinegar so they do not brown while you cool the dressing.
- Cocktail glassesStemmed glasses of the sort used for oyster and fruit cocktails at the time, roughly 4 to 6 ounces. The recipe gives no yield, but four cups of diced fruit and onion would fill something like six to eight such glasses.
- Yield of dressingHalf a cup of liquid plus two yolks makes about two-thirds of a cup of thick dressing, enough to spoon over each glass rather than to drown it.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of the recipe books Procter & Gamble put out to introduce cooks to Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening launched in 1911, which is why a tablespoon of it turns up in a salad dressing where butter would be the obvious choice. The dish itself belongs to the brief American vogue for the "cocktail" as a first course: after the oyster cocktail became standard restaurant fare in the late nineteenth century, cookbooks filled the same stemmed glasses with fruit, tomato, and combinations like this one. The cooked-yolk sour dressing is a close relative of the boiled dressings that served American households before bottled mayonnaise was widely sold.