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Salad Dressing (Boil one-half cup of vinegar)
Boil one-half cup of vinegar, one-half cup of milk, and butter the size of an egg. Then mix together and add to the above two tablespoons of sugar, one tablespoon of flour, one-half teaspoon of mustard, one teaspoon of salt, pinch of red pepper and a little cold water. After boiling add one egg well beaten.
— Mrs. E. S. Root
A boiled dressing of the kind that preceded mayonnaise in American home kitchens: a thin cooked custard sharpened with vinegar and mustard. The order of operations in the original is compressed, so read it through before starting.
- Butter the size of an eggUsually reckoned as about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Nineteenth-century books leaned on the egg as a rough size gauge; it is an approximation, not a measurement.
- The hinge: add the egg off the heatBeat the egg in a bowl, whisk a ladleful of the hot mixture into it, then return the whole thing to the pan over low heat and stir until it thickens. Dropping a raw egg into a boiling pan will scramble it, and the original's terse "after boiling" is the only warning you get.
- Cook the flour outThe flour, sugar, mustard, salt, pepper and cold water are meant to be worked into a smooth slurry, then stirred into the hot vinegar and milk and simmered a minute or two. Undercooked flour leaves a pasty taste that the vinegar will not mask.
- Milk and vinegar will look curdledHalf a cup of vinegar will separate the milk almost immediately. That is expected in boiled dressings; the flour and egg bring it back together as it thickens. Whisk rather than stir.
- Mustard and red pepper"Mustard" here means dry mustard powder, not prepared. "Red pepper" is cayenne — a pinch is genuinely a pinch.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold cider vinegar of the period varied in strength from batch to batch. Taste before you commit the full half cup if yours is sharp.
- Yield and keepingAround a cup and a half, enough for a large bowl of potato, cabbage or chicken salad. It thickens further as it cools; refrigerate and use within three or four days, thinning with a spoonful of milk if needed.
Boiled dressing was a common American salad dressing well into the twentieth century, and it survived alongside bottled mayonnaise because it needed no oil and no steady hand — a flour-and-egg thickened base did the work that emulsified oil does in mayonnaise. Cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s print many near-identical versions, differing mainly in the ratio of vinegar to milk and whether cream, butter or both supplied the richness. Its natural home was the cabbage slaw and the potato salad. Community collections like this one preserved these dressings under the contributor's married name, which is often the only record left of who in a given town was known for a good one.