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Bottled Salad Dressing
Beat yolks of eight eggs, add to them a cup of sugar, one tablespoon each of salt, mustard, and black pepper, a little cayenne, and half a cup of cream; mix thoroughly; bring to a boil a pint and a half vinegar, add one cup butter, let come to a boil, pour upon the mixture, stir well, and when cold put into bottles, and set in a cool place. It will keep for weeks in the hottest weather, and is excellent for cabbage or lettuce.
This is a boiled dressing of the kind that preceded commercial bottled salad dressing, but the method as printed never brings the egg to a safe temperature and the keeping instructions are the real problem.
- The eggs are never cookedEight raw yolks are tempered with hot vinegar and butter and then simply left to cool. Pouring hot liquid onto a cold, sugared, cream-loosened yolk mixture in a bowl does not reliably carry the whole mass through the temperature range at which Salmonella in egg yolk is destroyed, and the recipe never returns the dressing to the heat. Modern boiled dressings are cooked in the pan until they thicken for exactly this reason.
- "Keeps for weeks in the hottest weather"This is the claim that makes the recipe unusable rather than merely old-fashioned. Undercooked egg, dairy cream and butter held at ambient summer temperature in a stoppered bottle for weeks is a straightforward growth situation, and the "cool place" of a nineteenth-century cellar was neither measured nor cold. The acidity of a pint and a half of vinegar is genuinely protective, but it is not quantified here and cannot be relied on to hold a pH low enough throughout a mixture that also contains a cup of sugar, a cup of butter and half a cup of cream.
- No bottle treatment is describedThe dressing is poured into bottles with no mention of scalding them, no headspace, no seal and no processing. This is uncontrolled storage of a low-acid-diluted egg product, not preserving.
- What to do insteadUse a current recipe for cooked salad dressing, one that specifies cooking the egg base to temperature and refrigerating it, and treat this page as a document rather than a set of instructions.
- On the seasoning, for referenceA full tablespoon each of salt, dry mustard and black pepper against a cup of sugar makes for a sharp, sweet, salty dressing, which fits the recipe's own note that it is "excellent for cabbage or lettuce." "Mustard" in cookbooks of this period usually means dry powdered mustard rather than a prepared condiment.
- Vinegar strength has changedVinegar strength -- The recipe does not state the strength of its vinegar, which at the time could be homemade cider vinegar of variable acidity. Modern bottled vinegar is standardised at about five percent, so the acid balance of the original cannot be reproduced exactly from the text.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping was compiled in Ohio in the 1870s from contributions by many women. Cooked or "boiled" dressings of this type appear frequently in such books, and the ingredients they call for -- eggs, butter, cream and vinegar -- were farmhouse staples, while good salad oil had to be bought and went rancid. The instruction to bottle it and set it in a cool place is the point of the recipe's title, and it reflects a housekeeping preference for making a large batch of a keeping staple rather than a fresh dressing at each meal. Commercially bottled salad dressing was still decades from being a supermarket fixture. The confident promise that it would last "weeks in the hottest weather" is the sort of claim that pre-refrigeration cookbooks made and that modern food safety practice has since retired.