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Boiled Salad Dressing (Three eggs three tablespoons)
Three eggs, three tablespoons of sugar, oil and salt to taste, one cup of vinegar, one cup of milk, one teaspoon of mustard. Stir oil, salt, sugar and mustard in a bowl until perfectly smooth, add eggs and beat well, then vinegar and finally milk. Put all in a double boiler and boil until it thickens like a soft custard. This dressing will keep for weeks if kept in a cool place and tightly sealed.
— Mrs. E. C. Titus
A cooked ("boiled") salad dressing of the sort that preceded mayonnaise in most American kitchens. It works, but two things in the original need pinning down: the oil, which is left entirely to taste, and the keeping instruction.
- The unmeasured oilMrs. Titus gives no quantity. Start with about two tablespoons, which will round the dressing without breaking the custard; larger amounts are more likely to separate as it cools.
- Double boiler, and whyDo not be tempted to cook this over direct heat. With three eggs in two cups of liquid, the mixture sets between about 165F and 180F, and a hot pan bottom will scramble the eggs into grains before the whole thickens.
- "Boil until it thickens" means do not boilThe instruction is period shorthand for cooking over boiling water. The dressing itself should never bubble; pull it when it coats a spoon like a thin custard, roughly 8 to 12 minutes with steady stirring.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar of this period was commonly cider vinegar, probably in much the same 4 to 5 percent acidity range as today's. A full cup of it is assertive; taste after cooking and thin with a little more milk if it is sharper than you want.
- Curdling insuranceIf the dressing breaks, a few seconds in a blender may bring it back together; straining through a fine sieve will at least remove the grains.
- MustardAlmost certainly dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard from a jar, since it is stirred with the oil, sugar and salt "until perfectly smooth." Mustard also helps the oil emulsify.
- Keeping itIgnore "will keep for weeks in a cool place." This is a cooked egg-and-dairy product; refrigerate it in a sealed jar and use it inside a week.
- YieldTwo cups of liquid plus the eggs, oil and sugar gives something over two cups of finished dressing -- enough for a large bowl of potato salad, coleslaw or sliced cucumbers. It thickens further as it chills.
Boiled dressing belongs to the era before bottled mayonnaise, and before reliable ice could be taken for granted in many kitchens. Oil was, by most accounts, costly enough that cooks stretched a little of it with eggs, milk and vinegar and set the whole thing with gentle heat — a dressing closer in construction to a savory custard than to an emulsion. Recipes of this shape appear across late nineteenth-century American community cookbooks under names like "boiled dressing," "cooked dressing," and "salad cream," usually paired with cabbage or potatoes rather than delicate greens, since the dressing is thick and tangy enough to stand up to them. The attribution to Mrs. E. C. Titus is typical of the genre, in which compilations gathered household formulas from named contributors and the byline served as a credit.