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Standard French Dressing
Four tablespoonfuls of olive oil, two of vinegar, half a teaspoonful of salt, and a quarter of pepper. Put in a small glass jar, set on ice, shake well before using. This dressing may be varied in many ways: by the addition of a little curry powder; or three tablespoonfuls of whipped cream and lemon juice instead of vinegar; or a little Worcestershire sauce, a tablespoonful of chutney, and many other additions according to personal taste, and the salad to be dressed.
A plain 2:1 vinaigrette with the classic period ratio, written for a household that had ice but no refrigerator. It needs almost nothing translating, but a few notes help.
- The ratioFour to two is a sharper dressing than the 3:1 or 4:1 most modern cooks default to. Taste and slacken with more oil if it bites.
- "A quarter" of pepperThe recipe drops the unit; read it as a quarter teaspoon, matching the half teaspoon of salt. Freshly ground makes a noticeable difference in a dressing this bare.
- YieldSix tablespoons, enough for a salad for four. It does not keep especially well once flavourings are added, so make it in small batches as written.
- Set on iceChilling is not purely decorative: cold oil is thicker, and the shaken mixture tends to cling to the leaves rather than pool. Twenty minutes in the fridge does the same job.
- Shake, do not stirThe hinge of the recipe. Without mustard or egg there is no emulsifier here, so the only thing holding it together is vigorous agitation immediately before it goes on the salad.
- Olive oilPeriod "salad oil" was often a mild, refined oil rather than a peppery extra-virgin. A grassy modern oil will dominate the variations below; choose a gentle one if you are adding curry powder or chutney.
- The whipped-cream variationFold the cream in at the last moment and use it the same day. It makes a pale, thick dressing in the style of the old boiled and cream dressings, and it will weep if it stands.
- Chutney and curry powderChop the chutney fine or the dressing will not pour, and bloom curry powder briefly in a little of the oil first to take off the raw taste.
The name marks the dressing out from the other two things an American cookbook of this era meant by "salad dressing": the boiled, flour-thickened kind and the mayonnaise. "French" simply meant oil and vinegar, dressed at table, in what was understood to be the continental manner, and the phrase had already been in English-language cookbooks for decades before it was attached to the sweetened, tomato-tinted bottled product that now owns the term in the United States. The list of variations is the more revealing part of the entry: curry powder, Worcestershire sauce and chutney were all ordinary shelf goods in an English-speaking household by this date. The instruction to set the jar on ice suggests, though it cannot prove, a kitchen in which chilling was a deliberate act rather than the turn of a door handle.