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Boiled Salad Dressing (Three eggs one tablespoon)
Three eggs, one tablespoon sugar, one tablespoon melted butter, one tablespoon salt, one tablespoon mustard, one cup vinegar, one cup milk. Stir oil (or butter), salt, mustard and sugar in bowl until smooth, add eggs. Then beat well and add vinegar and milk last.
— Mrs. J. St. John Clairmont
A cooked, vinegar-based dressing of the sort that stood in for mayonnaise in most American households before bottled dressing. The printed method leaves out the step the name depends on, and one measurement is almost certainly a misprint.
- The missing stepNothing here tells you to cook it, but a boiled dressing is a thin custard: the mixed ingredients go into the top of a double boiler and are stirred constantly until they thicken enough to coat a spoon, around 160-170F. Direct heat or a moment of inattention curdles it. Cooking is also what makes the eggs safe.
- One tablespoon saltAgainst three eggs, a cup of milk and a cup of vinegar, a full tablespoon of salt reads as very salty for a dressing. Community cookbooks abbreviated freely and this may well be a teaspoon; season upward from a teaspoon rather than trusting the printed figure.
- MustardA tablespoon of mustard in a recipe of this kind most likely means dry mustard powder rather than prepared jarred mustard, though the text does not say. It goes in with the dry ingredients and needs the liquid and heat to lose its raw bite.
- Oil or butterThe ingredient list says melted butter; the method says "stir oil (or butter)". Either works, and a single tablespoon is all the fat there is, which is why this tastes tart and lean rather than rich like mayonnaise.
- Order of mixingThe vinegar goes in last, after the eggs are beaten in. Acid poured onto eggs before they are dispersed in the fat and dry ingredients can start to set them in strings.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar then ran anywhere from about 4 to 6 percent acid. Standard 5 percent cider vinegar suits it; if the finished dressing is too sharp, thin it with a little more milk rather than adding sugar.
- Yield and keepingMakes something over two cups. Cool it uncovered, then refrigerate in a jar; it will thicken further when cold and is best used within a few days. Thin with milk before using on potato salad, cabbage or cold meats.
Boiled dressing belongs to the era before cheap bottled salad oil and mechanical beaters made mayonnaise an everyday proposition. Eggs thickened by gentle heat, sharpened with vinegar and stretched with milk gave a clinging texture from ingredients any farmhouse already had. Dressings of this type are all over late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American community cookbooks, usually with a woman's name attached, as here. The book's "Village Receipts" section is that borrowing set down in print: contributed, lightly edited, and assuming the reader already knew that a dressing called boiled had to be boiled.