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Salad Sauce
Take the yolks of two eggs boiled hard, a dessert-spoonful of grated Parmesan cheese, a little made mustard, a dessert-spoonful of tarragon vinegar, and a large spoonful of ketchup. When well incorporated, add four spoonfuls of salad oil and one spoonful of elder vinegar. Beat so as to incorporate the oil with the other ingredients. This mixture must not be poured upon the lettuce or vegetables used in the salad, but be left at the bottom, to be stirred up when wanted. This method preserves the crispness of the lettuce. Observe that the liquid ingredients must be proportioned to the quantity of vegetables used.
A cooked-yolk dressing rather than a mayonnaise: the hard yolks act as the emulsifier, so the texture depends entirely on how finely they are broken down before the oil goes in.
- The hingeSieve or mash the hard yolks to a completely smooth paste with the mustard and cheese before any liquid is added. Any lumps left at this stage will never disperse, and the oil will sit on top instead of emulsifying.
- Add the oil slowly"Beat so as to incorporate the oil" means dribble it in, not pour. Four spoonfuls added at once into two yolks will break the sauce.
- Spoon measuresA dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons; the unqualified "spoonful" here almost certainly means a tablespoon, and "a large spoonful" a generous one. The proportions are elastic by design — the closing line tells you to scale the liquids to the volume of greens.
- KetchupIn a Victorian British kitchen this would most often mean mushroom or walnut ketchup: thin, dark, salty, closer to a savoury sauce than to modern tomato ketchup. Tomato ketchup will make the dressing sweet and pink; mushroom ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, or a dash of soy is nearer the intent.
- Made mustard"Made" mustard is mustard powder already mixed to a paste with water — in other words prepared mustard. Dijon or English mustard from a jar does the job.
- Elder vinegarVinegar infused with elder, usually the flowers, though elderberry versions were also made; rarely sold now. Plain white wine vinegar is the sensible stand-in; the tarragon vinegar is still widely available.
- ParmesanGrate it very fine, on a microplane if possible. Coarse shreds will not melt into a cold sauce and simply read as gritty.
- Dressing in the bottom of the bowlThe instruction to leave the sauce beneath the leaves and toss only at table is sound and still worth following, particularly with butterhead or cos lettuce. Salt and acid draw water out of leaves within a few minutes.
- YieldA small quantity: on the tablespoon reading of "spoonful" it comes to something under half a cup -- enough for a salad for four to six. It thickens when chilled; let it stand and beat again before serving.
Cooked-yolk dressings of this kind were common in English cookery through much of the nineteenth century, standing between the plain oil-and-vinegar of the French table and the raw-yolk mayonnaise that later displaced them. The additions here -- Parmesan, ketchup, two flavoured vinegars -- are characteristic of the late-Victorian pantry, where bottled sauces and infused vinegars were kept as a matter of course and used much as we now use condiments from a jar. The closing note is the real lesson: dress a salad at the last moment, and let the eater do the mixing.