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Salad Dressing Without Oil
No. 1.--Mix a tea-spoonful of salt and half a tea-spoonful of white pepper with three table-spoonfuls of thick sour cream. Beat well, and add a table-spoonful of vinegar. If liked, a little sugar may be rubbed upon the rind of a fresh lemon, and dissolved in the vinegar before it is mixed with the cream. No. 2.--Rub the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs till smooth. Add a spoonful of mixed mustard, a quarter of a tea-spoonful of white pepper, half a salt-spoonful of salt, a pinch of cayenne, and two table-spoonfuls of thick cream. When all these ingredients are thoroughly mixed, add very gradually as much vinegar as will make the sauce of the consistency of cream.
Two cream-based dressings from the era when British cooks distrusted the olive oil available to them. Both are quick, but the vinegar has to go in last and slowly or the cream will break.
- Salt-spoon and spoonfulA salt-spoon is usually reckoned at about a quarter teaspoon, so "half a salt-spoonful" is a scant eighth of a teaspoon. The unqualified "spoonful of mixed mustard" in No. 2 is ambiguous; since the recipe specifies tea- and table-spoonfuls elsewhere, a teaspoon is the safer reading.
- Sour cream, then and nowVictorian sour cream was generally raw cream left to acidify naturally: pourable and tangy rather than the set, cultured product sold today. Creme fraiche is a reasonable substitute; commercial sour cream also works but is thicker, so loosen it slightly and taste before adding all the vinegar.
- Mixed mustardThis is prepared mustard paste, English style, not dry powder. If you only have powder, mix it with a little cold water and let it stand ten minutes so the heat develops.
- Add the vinegar drop by dropAdd the vinegar slowly -- No. 2 explicitly says to add it "very gradually." Acid stirred into cream too fast can make it grainy, so beat it in a little at a time until the sauce slackens to pouring consistency; No. 1's proportion is a tablespoon of vinegar to three of cream.
- Sieve the yolksHard-boiled yolks rub smooth far more easily while still warm. Press them through a fine sieve rather than mashing, or the finished dressing will be gritty.
- The lemon-sugar trickRubbing sugar over lemon rind draws out the peel oil, a long-standing confectionery technique. A pinch of caster sugar mixed with finely grated zest, stirred into the vinegar, gives much the same effect.
- YieldEach version makes only about a quarter cup, enough to dress a small salad. Both are best made shortly before serving.
Cassell's offers these under the frank title "without oil" because in nineteenth-century Britain salad oil was a genuine problem. Imported olive oil arrived slowly and was often adulterated or rancid by the time it reached a provincial grocer. Cream and vinegar dressings, sharpened with mustard and hard-boiled yolk, were the domestic answer, and they are often said to have a long history in English cookery books; the sieved-yolk version is sometimes traced to the older "salad sauce" that a cook made when the dairy was closer to hand than the grocer. The lemon-sugar detail in No. 1 belongs to the same period's confectionery practice, where sugar rubbed on citrus rind was a common way to capture peel oil before bottled extracts were common.