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Dressing for Salads
A Two eggs, whites and yolks beaten separately, one tablespoonful mixed mustard, one teaspoon salt, one teaspoon pepper, one tablespoonful butter, three tablespoons cream, eight tablespoons vinegar. Put first into a bowl the yolks well beaten, then the mustard, salt, pepper, butter, cream and whites of eggs, and lastly vinegar, put all into a farina kettle and let it cook like custard, but not boil. When cold pour over the salad.
A cooked (boiled) salad dressing of the kind that preceded bottled mayonnaise in American households. It is essentially a thin savoury custard sharpened with vinegar, and the whole thing turns on temperature control.
- Farina kettleA farina kettle is a double boiler — an inner pan set over simmering water. Use one, or a heatproof bowl over a pan of water that is barely trembling. Direct heat will scramble the eggs before the mixture thickens.
- "Cook like custard, but not boil"This is the hinge. The dressing thickens between about 160F and 180F; above that the egg proteins tighten and the sauce breaks into curds and whey. Stir constantly and pull it off the heat when it coats the back of a spoon.
- Mixed mustard"Mixed mustard" means mustard powder already made into a paste with water or vinegar — a prepared mustard, not dry powder. A tablespoon of a plain English or Dijon-style mustard is the equivalent.
- The pepperA full teaspoon of pepper in roughly a cup of dressing is assertive by modern standards, and nineteenth-century pepper was often coarser and staler than what you have. Start with a quarter teaspoon and adjust.
- Vinegar strengthEight tablespoons is half a cup, which will taste very sharp with modern 5 percent cider or white wine vinegar. Period household vinegar varied in strength; taste as you go rather than committing all of it.
- Order of additionThe vinegar goes in last, after the eggs and cream are combined. Keep to the order given.
- Yield and useA generous cup, enough for a large bowl of potato, cabbage or cold chicken salad. It must be fully cold before it goes on the greens, and it will keep a few days refrigerated, thickening as it sits.
Cooked dressings like this one are often said to have been the usual American choice for salads through most of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. Mayonnaise, which relies on raw yolks and a slow stream of oil, demanded good salad oil and a steady arm; a boiled dressing needed only eggs, butter, cream and vinegar — all of them already in the house. The style survives commercially in the sweeter, tangier bottled dressings sold as an alternative to mayonnaise, and in the regional potato and cole slaws of the Midwest and Pennsylvania. The instruction to cook it in a farina kettle is a small clue to the period kitchen: the same pan used for morning cereal did double duty for anything that needed gentle, indirect heat.