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Kitchener's Salad Mixture
Boil a couple of eggs for twenty minutes, and put them in a basin of cold water for a few minutes; the yolks must be quite cold and hard, or they will not incorporate with the ingredients. Rub the yolks through a sieve with a wooden spoon, and mix with them a table-spoonful of milk, or fine double cream, then add two table-spoonfuls of oil, or melted butter; when these are well mixed, add by degrees a tea-spoonful of salt, or powdered lump sugar, and the same of made mustard. When these ingredients are smoothly united, add very gradually three table-spoonful of vinegar, mix it with the other ingredients till it is thoroughly incorporated with them; cut up the white of the egg, and garnish the top of the salad with it. Let the sauce remain at the bottom of the bowl, and do not stir up the salad till it is to be eaten. If the herbs be young, freshly gathered, neatly trimmed, and drained dry, and the sauce maker ponders patiently over these directions, he cannot fail obtaining the fame of being a very accomplished salad dresser. Probable cost, 4d. Sufficient for a good-sized bowl of salad.
A cooked-yolk salad dressing of the pre-mayonnaise English type. It comes together easily so long as the yolks are genuinely cold and dry, and the vinegar goes in last and slowly.
- The hinge: cold, hard yolksWarm or damp yolks will slip rather than sieve, and the sauce turns grainy instead of creamy. Chill them fully in cold water before pressing them through a fine sieve, and work the paste smooth before any liquid goes in.
- Twenty minutes is too longModern practice gives eggs 10-12 minutes at a bare simmer; twenty produces the grey-green sulphide ring and a chalky yolk. The dressing will still work, but the flavour is coarser.
- Made mustardThis means prepared wet mustard, not powder. English mustard is the period-correct choice; a teaspoon of it is assertive, so taste before committing the full amount.
- Powdered lump sugarSugar loaf crushed fine, roughly today's caster or superfine sugar. Note that the original offers it as an alternative to the salt, not an addition, which reads oddly to modern palates; if you want both, add the salt and then the sugar by taste.
- Oil or melted butterThe recipe allows melted butter in place of oil, but butter sets solid on cold leaves. Use a mild olive or a neutral oil unless you are serving the salad warm.
- The vinegar ratioThree tablespoons vinegar to two of oil is far sharper than the modern three-to-one in oil's favour, though the milk or cream and the sieved yolk soften it. Vinegar strength was not standardised in the period, so add it gradually and stop when the balance suits you.
- Sauce at the bottomThe instruction to leave the dressing beneath the undisturbed leaves is deliberate: dressed greens wilt within minutes. Toss at the table.
- Yield and costEnough for a large bowl of leaves, as the original says; it gives no serving count. The 4d is a period retail estimate and has no modern equivalent worth quoting.
The name points to Dr William Kitchiner, the wealthy Londoner who held a medical degree but did not practise, and whose The Cook's Oracle (1817) was among the first English cookbooks to insist on precise, tested quantities; his recipes were still being reprinted and re-attributed decades later. Kitchiner was famous for sauces, and for the fussy, companionable tone that survives here in the promise that a patient sauce maker will earn 'the fame of being a very accomplished salad dresser'. The dressing itself belongs to the older English tradition of binding a salad sauce with sieved hard-boiled yolk rather than raw yolk; it is stable, forgiving, and needs no whisking skill, which may be why it held its place in household books long after French mayonnaise was well known in England. The insistence on herbs 'young, freshly gathered, neatly trimmed, and drained dry' reflects a period when salad greens came from the kitchen garden.