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Honey Dressing
Put in a glass bowl two tablespoonfuls of honey, a tablespoonful of lemon juice, and three tablespoonfuls of olive oil. Season with salt to taste. How much seasoning you put in depends upon what you use this dressing on. It is very good on fruit salad, in which case very little salt is required. If used on lettuce both salt and pepper may be added.
A three-ingredient emulsion that needs almost no translation, though a few notes will help it behave.
- YieldAbout 6 tablespoons, enough to dress a salad for four. It scales up directly.
- The ratioThree parts oil to one part acid, with honey doing double duty as sweetener and thickener. Taste before you commit the whole batch.
- Getting it to emulsifyWhisk the honey and lemon juice together first until the honey dissolves, then add the oil in a thin stream. Honey stirred straight into oil sinks and stays there. A jar with a tight lid and vigorous shaking works as well as a whisk.
- Honey consistencyCold or crystallised honey will not measure or blend accurately. Warm the jar in hot water until it pours freely.
- Olive oilAmerican home kitchens of the period would generally have used a mild, often refined olive oil. A grassy, peppery extra-virgin will dominate honey and lemon; choose something gentle, or use half a neutral oil.
- The salt instructionThe recipe is right to be vague. On fruit a couple of pinches sharpens the sweetness without reading as savoury; on lettuce you want salt and pepper at full strength, closer to a quarter teaspoon of salt for this quantity.
- Holding itIt separates within an hour or two. Keep it in the jar you mixed it in, refrigerate, and shake again before use; the oil will need a few minutes at room temperature to loosen.
Honey as the sweet element in a salad dressing belongs to a particular American moment: the fruit salad, served on a bed of lettuce with a sweet dressing, was a fixture of ladies' luncheons and tearoom menus from the 1910s through the 1940s, and cookbooks of the period are full of boiled, cooked and creamy dressings meant for exactly that plate. What is notable here is the restraint. Many contemporary fruit-salad dressings leaned on cooked egg yolks, condensed milk or whipped cream; this one is a plain vinaigrette with honey standing in for sugar, which puts it much closer to what a modern cook would make.