Lettuce Salad
Take the yolks of three hard-boiled eggs, add salt and mustard to taste; mash it fine; make a paste by adding a dessert-spoon of olive-oil or melted butter (use butter always when it is difficult to get fresh oil); mix thoroughly, and then dilute by adding gradually a tea-cup of vinegar, and pour over the lettuce. Garnish by slicing another egg and laying over the lettuce. This is sufficient for a moderate-sized dish of lettuce. - Mrs. Col. Reid, Delaware, Ohio.
A cooked-yolk dressing of the sort that preceded bottled mayonnaise in inland American kitchens. Nothing here is difficult, but the proportions need reading before you pour.
- The vinegar is the hingeA tea-cup is conventionally reckoned at roughly 3/4 cup, and 3/4 cup of modern distilled vinegar over one dish of lettuce will be brutally sharp. Household vinegar of the period was often homemade cider vinegar of uneven and possibly lower acidity; add it a spoonful at a time and stop when the dressing tastes right to you.
- Dessert-spoonTwo teaspoons, sitting between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. It is a small amount of fat against a large amount of acid, which is why the result is a thin pouring dressing rather than anything creamy.
- Mustard means powderMustard probably means powder -- "mustard" in recipes of this period usually means dry mustard flour rather than a prepared condiment, though prepared mustards were also available. The recipe says only "to taste"; half a teaspoon is a reasonable starting point, and it also helps the oil and vinegar hold together briefly.
- Butter as substituteThe instruction to use melted butter when fresh oil is hard to get reflects genuine supply problems away from the coasts, where imported olive oil went rancid on the shelf. Butter sets as the dressing cools, so dress the lettuce immediately or the fat will seize into flecks.
- Mashing the yolksPush the hard-boiled yolks through a sieve rather than mashing with a fork. Any lump left in the paste stays a lump once the vinegar goes in, and the dressing cannot be smoothed out afterwards.
- Dress at the tableVinegar this assertive collapses lettuce within minutes. Pour over just before serving, and use a crisp head lettuce or romaine rather than tender leaves.
- YieldThe recipe claims only enough for "a moderate-sized dish of lettuce", which suggests a side dish for a small table. The garnish calls for a further whole egg, sliced, beyond the three used for the dressing; no other addition is mentioned.
Egg-yolk dressings like this one are often described as the everyday American cousin of mayonnaise, arrived at from the other direction: instead of emulsifying raw yolk with a great deal of oil, the cook mashes cooked yolk with a very little fat and lets vinegar carry it. That inversion was practical rather than aesthetic. Buckeye Cookery was published in 1877 and revised through the 1880s, and its readers lived a long way from a reliable supply of good olive oil, hence the parenthetical permission to use butter always when fresh oil is difficult to get. Salads themselves occupy only a short section in books of this period, lettuce being a seasonal crop eaten close to the garden; the dressing was expected to be assembled at the last moment from things any kitchen already had, which is exactly what three hard-boiled eggs, mustard and vinegar are. Like much of the book, the recipe is credited to a named contributor, in this case Mrs. Col. Reid of Delaware, Ohio, a reminder that these volumes were community collections rather than the work of a single author.