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Butter Salad Dressing
Four tablespoons butter, one tablespoon flour, one cup milk, three eggs well beaten, one teaspoon salt, one teaspoon mustard, one tablespoon sugar, dash cayenne pepper, one-half cup vinegar. Melt butter, add flour, then milk, cook until it thickens, add dry ingredients mixed with a little of the vinegar, next add eggs and vinegar. Cook until creamy.
— Mrs. Harmon Hallenbeck
A cooked or "boiled" salad dressing of the pre-mayonnaise sort: a butter-and-flour white sauce sharpened with vinegar and thickened further with egg. It comes together in about ten minutes and the only real hazard is scrambling it.
- Low heat once the eggs go inThis is the hinge. After the eggs and vinegar are added the mixture must be held below a simmer and stirred constantly, or the egg will set in threads. A heavy saucepan over low heat works; a double boiler is safer if you are distracted easily.
- Temper the eggsThe original says only "next add eggs and vinegar." Whisk a ladleful of the hot milk sauce into the beaten eggs first, then return the lot to the pan. Pouring cold beaten eggs straight into a thickened hot sauce is how this recipe fails.
- Add the vinegar last, and slowlyAcid poured into hot milk will curdle it. Dribbling in the half cup at the end, off the fiercest heat, keeps the sauce smooth. The small amount used to slake the dry ingredients is fine.
- "One teaspoon mustard"Dry mustard powder, not prepared mustard — it is listed among the dry ingredients mixed with vinegar, which is the standard way of blooming mustard flour. English mustard powder is the closest match.
- Cook until it thickensThe finished dressing coats a spoon and is roughly the consistency of pouring custard; like any egg-thickened sauce it should be held well below a simmer. It thickens noticeably again as it cools, so stop while it still looks slightly loose.
- SaltA full teaspoon in about two cups of dressing is on the assertive side for modern palates used to salted butter. Start with half and adjust at the end.
- Yield and keepingMakes roughly two cups. Store covered in the refrigerator and use within four or five days; it will stiffen to a spreadable paste when cold and can be thinned with a spoonful of milk or cream.
- What to put it onDressings of this kind were commonly used on potato salad, cabbage slaw, cold sliced chicken and hard-boiled eggs, where the tartness stands in for mayonnaise; the recipe itself does not say. It is sharper and thicker than a dressing for delicate greens.
Boiled dressings like this one were the American home cook's answer to mayonnaise for most of the nineteenth century. Mayonnaise depends on emulsifying a large quantity of oil into raw yolk, and it called for commercial salad oil that was cheap and reliably fresh; butter, flour, milk and eggs were all at hand, and vinegar did the work of lemon. The result keeps better than a raw emulsion and stands up to being spooned over hot potatoes. Recipes of this type appear under names like "cream dressing" and "boiled dressing" in dozens of community cookbooks of the period, each credited to a particular contributor here Mrs. Harmon Hallenbeck.