Ham Salad
Cut up small bits of boiled ham, place in salad-bowl with the hearts and inside leaves of a head of lettuce. Make dressing as follows: Mix in a sauce-pan one pint sour cream, as free from milk as possible, and half pint good vinegar, pepper, salt, a small piece of butter, sugar, and a small table-spoon of mustard mixed smooth; boil, add the well-beaten yolks of two eggs, stirring carefully as for float, until it thickens to the consistency of starch, then set in a cool place or on ice, and when cold pour over salad and mix well. -Mrs. S. Watson, Upper Sandusky, Ohio.
A boiled sour-cream dressing of the kind that preceded bottled mayonnaise. The cooking of the eggs is the whole trick, and everything else is forgiving.
- The hinge: do not let the eggs boilOnce the beaten yolks go in, keep the pan below a simmer and stir without stopping until the mixture coats the spoon like thin starch paste. Any real boil and you have sweetened scrambled egg in vinegar, which cannot be recovered.
- "As for float"Float was the period name for a boiled custard served under whipped or beaten egg white. The instruction means: treat this like custard, gentle heat and constant motion, ideally over water rather than direct flame.
- Sour cream then and nowIn 1877 this would most likely have been raw cream left to sour naturally, thick and high in fat. Modern cultured sour cream is thinner and is more apt to break when boiled with vinegar; full-fat sour cream or creme fraiche stirred over low heat holds together best.
- "Free from milk as possible"A reminder to skim only the risen cream and leave the sour milk behind. The lower the milk content, the less likely the mixture is to curdle in the pan.
- Vinegar strengthHomemade nineteenth-century cider vinegar varied in strength and may have been weaker or sharper than today's standardized 5 percent. Start with about half the vinegar, taste when the dressing is cool, and add the rest only if it needs it.
- Unmeasured seasoningsPepper, salt, sugar and butter are left to judgment. For a pint of cream, figure a tablespoon of butter, a teaspoon of salt and one to two tablespoons of sugar as a starting point; the mustard is roughly a scant tablespoon of powder slaked with cold water.
- Chill before dressingPouring the dressing on warm will wilt the lettuce hearts and turn the salad to soup. It should be cold and thick, and the ham and lettuce cold as well.
- YieldThe dressing makes about three cups, considerably more than one head of lettuce and a cup or so of diced ham will take. Half the dressing recipe suits a salad for four to six, or keep the remainder refrigerated for a few days and use it on potatoes or cabbage.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) grew out of an Ohio community compilation, and entries like this one carry the contributor's name and town as a kind of credential. The dressing belongs to the American boiled-dressing tradition, which appears to have been common in home salads until commercial mayonnaise became widely available in the early twentieth century: cream or milk thickened with egg yolk, sharpened with vinegar and mustard, and cooked rather than emulsified raw. Sour cream as the base rather than milk suggests a dairying household with cream on hand, and soured cream dressings on lettuce, cucumber and cabbage were familiar in the Midwest. Cold boiled ham was often said to be Sunday-and-after fare, and salads in this period were as often built from what the larder held as composed for their own sake.