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Sherry's French Dressing
Mix half a cup of olive oil, four tablespoonfuls of vinegar, half a small onion chopped very fine, twice as much parsley, one tablespoonful of chopped green pepper, and a tablespoonful of salt.
Put all ingredients into a small glass preserving jar with a tight top. Set on the ice for an hour.
Before serving shake the dressing until it thickens slightly.
A shaken vinaigrette in the older restaurant style, leaner in oil than the 3:1 ratio most cooks use today. Two things need attention: the salt and the chill.
- The tablespoon of saltA full tablespoon in roughly three-quarters of a cup of dressing is far saltier than modern palates accept. Start with a teaspoon and adjust after tasting on a leaf of lettuce, not off a spoon.
- "Set on the ice"This means the icebox: refrigerate for an hour. The rest is not idle time — it lets the onion, parsley and green pepper give up their flavor into the oil and vinegar.
- ProportionsHalf a cup oil to four tablespoons vinegar is a 2:1 ratio, noticeably sharp. If your vinegar is a cider or wine vinegar at 5-6% acidity, either add another two tablespoons of oil or use the dressing on sturdy greens that can take the bite.
- Twice as much parsleyTwice the volume of the chopped onion, so roughly two tablespoons if you have used one tablespoon of onion from that half small onion. Flat-leaf parsley chopped fine; curly will float in coarse flecks.
- The shakingThe thickening at the end is a temporary emulsion held together by nothing but agitation. It will separate within minutes, so shake at the table and dress the salad immediately.
- YieldAbout three-quarters of a cup, enough for a large bowl of greens serving six to eight. It keeps a few days refrigerated, though the raw onion sharpens as it sits.
The name points to Louis Sherry, whose New York restaurant and confectionery was among the handful of establishments — with Delmonico's and the Waldorf — whose kitchens lent their names to dishes that then circulated through American home cookbooks for decades. By the time a recipe like this appears in a general household collection, the attribution is less a citation than a promise of metropolitan polish; whether the dressing was ever mixed exactly this way in Sherry's own pantry is not documented. What the recipe does record faithfully is pre-refrigerator technique: the glass preserving jar with a tight top served as both mixing vessel and shaker, and "set on the ice" was the standard instruction in an era when the icebox, not a thermostat-controlled compartment, did the chilling.