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Lettuce Salad
Take the crisp leaves of young lettuce broken into small pieces, and two eggs boiled hard, chopped not too fine; toss lightly together. Sprinkle the top thickly with walnuts, pour over dressing and serve on lettuce leaves.
Dressing-Two eggs, one-half teaspoon of mustard, one-half teaspoon of salt, one tablespoon of sugar, two tablespoons of butter, one tumbler of weak vinegar and water. Beat the eggs and add gradually the different ingredients, the butter last slightly melted. Set basin on range, stir till it thiekens. When ready to use, add one-half cup of cream and beat until smooth and light.
— Mrs. B. B. Maguire
A boiled dressing of the kind that preceded jarred mayonnaise in most American kitchens, poured over lettuce and chopped hard eggs. The dressing is the whole job; the salad takes a minute.
- The hinge: gentle heatThe dressing is a thin egg custard and will scramble if it goes much past 175F. Use a double boiler or the lowest burner setting, stir constantly, and pull it off the heat the moment it coats the spoon.
- A tumblerA drinking tumbler of the period held roughly 8 fluid ounces, so read it as one cup of liquid in total.
- "Weak vinegar and water"Vinegar strength was far less standardised than today's 5 percent cider vinegar, so the receipt leaves the dilution to the cook. Roughly one part vinegar to two parts water gives a mild acidity; taste the mixture before it goes into the eggs.
- Butter last, and barely meltedAdding cold butter to hot egg would chill the mixture unevenly; adding fully hot butter risks curdling. Soften it just to the point of pouring.
- The cream is finishing, not cookingHalf a cup of cream goes in at serving time, once the base is off the heat, which loosens the dressing. Beating it in cold gives the light texture the receipt describes.
- Eggs, two lotsTwo hard-boiled eggs go into the salad and two raw eggs into the dressing, four in all. The dressing eggs are cooked through by the thickening step.
- WalnutsToasting the walnut pieces in a dry pan for a few minutes improves them considerably and keeps them from going soft under the dressing.
- Yield and keepingThe dressing comes to something like two cups once the cream is beaten in. Keep it covered and cold, and whisk it again before use.
Boiled dressing was the standard American salad sauce through the second half of the nineteenth century: eggs, vinegar, mustard, sugar and butter cooked to a custard, cheaper and steadier than an oil emulsion in a kitchen without reliable refrigeration or a whisk-friendly bowl of ice. Community cookbooks like this one are where such dressings survive in their most domestic form, each with slightly different proportions of sugar and vinegar. The addition of walnuts and the direction to serve on whole lettuce leaves reflect a turn-of-the-century fashion for salads presented as a composed course rather than a relish, a habit generally traced to the influence of hotel and cooking-school dining on middle-class tables.