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A Salad Dressing
One tablespoon of flour, one tablespoon of sugar, one-half teaspoon of salt, one teaspoon of dry mustard, one egg, one cup of milk, one cup of vinegar, one small piece of butter. Mix all together cold; cook until it creams. This may be used with cold meats.
— Mrs. Rudolph Stahl
A cooked or "boiled" salad dressing of the sort that preceded bottled mayonnaise in country kitchens. The flour and egg both thicken it, and the hinge is temperature control.
- Mix cold, and mean itWhisk the flour, sugar, salt and mustard together dry, then beat in the egg and milk before the vinegar goes in. Adding vinegar to a warm mixture, or adding egg to a hot one, gives you scrambled egg in sour milk rather than a dressing.
- Expect the milk to curdleA cup of vinegar against a cup of milk will look broken and grainy as it heats. The flour and the egg bring it back together as it thickens; keep whisking and it will smooth out into a cream.
- "Cook until it creams"Use a heavy saucepan over low heat, or a double boiler if you are cautious, and stir constantly until it coats the spoon and no longer tastes of raw flour, roughly 5 to 8 minutes. Do not let it reach a rolling boil or the egg will curdle irretrievably.
- Butter lastButter — "one small piece" is unmeasured; a tablespoon is a reasonable guess. Note that the recipe itself says to mix everything together cold, butter included; stirring it in off the heat at the end, for gloss and to soften the sharpness, is a departure from the written direction.
- Vinegar strengthCider vinegar of this period was not standardised the way today's 5 percent is, and its strength varied. A full cup of modern vinegar is aggressive; taste before serving and add a little more sugar or milk if it bites.
- Yield and keepingAbout two cups. It thickens considerably as it cools, so thin with a spoonful of milk or cream before dressing potatoes, cabbage or cold meat. Refrigerate and use within four or five days.
Cooked dressings like this one were common in American home kitchens before commercial mayonnaise became widely available in the 1910s and 1920s. They required no oil, which was costly and could be rancid in rural stores, and no sustained beating over a bowl of raw yolks; flour and a whole egg did the thickening instead. Versions appear under various names in regional community cookbooks, and the direction that it "may be used with cold meats" suggests a household role as a sauce for leftovers, boiled potatoes and shredded cabbage. Similar formulas, with more sugar, resemble the sweet-sour dressings still sold as boiled or old-fashioned slaw dressing.