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Introducing the Great Fuel Foods: Fats: Dressing
Cream, beaten solid, is added to a mayonnaise dressing, or, with seasonings and a little lemon juice, is used by itself as a salad dressing. FRENCH DRESSING 3 tablespoonfuls of oil 1/4 teaspoonful of salt 1 to 3 tablespoonfuls of lemon 1/8 teaspoonful of pepper juice or vinegar The ingredients for the dressing may be mixed and poured at once over the salad materials, which are then turned over and over until the dressing has been taken up by them, or, the condiments, mixed with the oil, may be first used, then, after each leaf or separate piece has been thoroughly coated with the oil, the acid may be poured on and the salad turned over and over until the acid is evenly mixed throughout.
MAYONNAISE DRESSING 1/8 teaspoonful of paprika 1 cup of olive oil 1/4 teaspoonful of salt 1 tablespoonful of lemon juice Yolk of 1 egg 1 tablespoonful of vinegar Mix the salt and pepper, add the yolk of egg, and beat until thickened a little; add the lemon juice and vinegar gradually. Use a Dover egg beater, and beat in the oil, a teaspoonful at a time. After a time the oil may be added by the tablespoonful. Beat thoroughly after each addition of oil, as also during the time the oil is being taken up by the mixture.
Cover the dressing with an earthen or glass dish, and let stand in a cool place until ready to use.
Half this quantity of dressing may be made by dividing the yolk of egg. The main point to be noted in making this dressing is, that all of the acid is to be added to the yolk of egg before beginning with the oil. By this method all danger of curdling is avoided.
Two dressings printed in the old two-column style, which is why the ingredient lists read strangely on screen. The French dressing is straightforward; the mayonnaise is the reason for the caution above.
- Untangling the ingredient columnsThe lists were set in two columns and have run together. The French dressing is 3 tablespoons oil, 1 to 3 tablespoons lemon juice or vinegar, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/8 teaspoon pepper. The mayonnaise is 1 cup olive oil, 1 egg yolk, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, 1 tablespoon vinegar, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/8 teaspoon paprika — the method then says to "mix the salt and pepper," though no pepper appears in the mayonnaise list; the paprika is presumably what is meant.
- Why the mayonnaise cannot be recommendedThe yolk is never heated at any stage, and the finished dressing is held only in "a cool place," which in a kitchen of this period means an unrefrigerated larder. Raw shell egg carries a Salmonella risk that acid and oil do not eliminate; the roughly 2 tablespoons of acid in a cup of oil is nowhere near enough to make the yolk safe, and standing at room temperature works in the wrong direction. Use a current mayonnaise recipe written for pasteurised egg if you want to make mayonnaise.
- The acid-first claimThe book's "main point" — all the acid into the yolk before any oil — genuinely does help, because the diluted yolk takes up the first spoonfuls of oil more readily. It is an emulsion technique, not a preservation one, and the author's confidence that "all danger of curdling is avoided" refers only to the dressing breaking.
- Dover egg beaterA hand-cranked rotary beater, the standard American kitchen tool from the 1870s onward. A balloon whisk does the same job. A blender or food processor is a poor substitute: high-speed blending is widely reported to turn olive oil bitter.
- French dressing proportionsThree parts oil to one part acid is the modern default, and the recipe's upper limit of 3 tablespoons of acid to 3 of oil is a one-to-one dressing that will taste startlingly sharp. Start at the low end of the range.
- The two-stage dressing methodCoating the leaves in seasoned oil first, then adding the acid, is worth doing. The usual explanation is that the oil film keeps the vinegar or lemon juice from drawing water out of the greens, and the salad is said to stay crisp longer than with a pre-mixed dressing.
- Dividing a yolkTo halve the mayonnaise the book tells you to divide the yolk — beat the whole yolk smooth first, then measure out half by volume. A yolk runs about 1 tablespoon.
- YieldThe French dressing makes about 1/4 cup, enough for a salad for two. The mayonnaise makes a generous cup, far more than two people need at one sitting; the book says only to cover it and leave it in a cool place until wanted.
This page sits in a chapter on fats, which tells you what the book is doing: it belongs to the wave of early twentieth-century domestic-science cookery that organised food by nutritional function — fuel foods, tissue builders, regulators — rather than by course. Dressings earned a place under fats, one may guess, because oil was one of the few concentrated fats a household could eat uncooked, though the book does not say so. The insistence on a Dover egg beater and a teaspoon-at-a-time oil addition reflects a period when mayonnaise was still made at home as a matter of course; commercial jarred mayonnaise reached American shops in the 1910s and 1920s and steadily displaced the hand-beaten kind. "French dressing" here means what it originally meant — oil, acid, salt, pepper — not the sweetened orange-red bottled dressing that later claimed the name in the United States.