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Dressing (One-half cup Five Roses flour)
One-half cup Five Roses flour, 1/2 cup sugar, 2 tablespoons mustard, a little cayenne pepper, 1 tablespoon celery seed, pinch of salt, nearly 1 quart of vinegar.
An ingredient list rather than a method — the Five Roses book assumed its readers knew what to do with a boiled dressing. Everything here has to be cooked together until the flour thickens; whisked cold it is simply gritty vinegar.
- The hinge: cook it, and cook the flour outBlend the flour, sugar, mustard, celery seed, salt and cayenne dry, then whisk in the vinegar gradually so no lumps form, and cook over low heat or a double boiler until it thickens and loses its raw-flour taste — roughly 8 to 10 minutes at a bare simmer. Acid weakens starch thickening, so it will never set as firmly as a milk-based sauce.
- "Mustard" means dry mustardIn a book of this period the unqualified word usually means mustard powder rather than prepared mustard from a jar, and the dry-measured list here supports that reading. Two tablespoons of powder is assertive; prepared mustard would give a much milder and wetter result.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat all-purpose flour from the Lake of the Woods Milling Company. Ordinary all-purpose flour substitutes directly here, since it is doing nothing but thickening.
- Nearly a quart of vinegarJust under 4 cups against half a cup of flour gives a thin, pourable dressing rather than a spoonable one. If you want something closer to a modern boiled dressing, hold back a cup of the vinegar and add it at the end to taste.
- Which vinegarHousehold vinegar of this period varied in strength and was commonly cider or white. Use a standard 5 percent cider vinegar; anything stronger, such as pickling vinegar, will be punishing at this volume.
- No egg, no oil, no creamMany boiled dressings of the era were enriched with egg or milk; this one is pure starch and vinegar, which will help it keep. A beaten egg yolk or a spoonful of butter or cream stirred in off the heat would round it, but that is an addition, not part of the original.
- Yield and keepingAbout a quart. Store it covered in the refrigerator — the acidity is high, but a flour-thickened sauce is still a cooked food and should be treated as one. Expect it to thicken further as it cools and to need a stir or a splash of vinegar before use.
- How to use itThis is a dressing for sturdy things: shredded cabbage, potato salad, cold sliced beets, boiled dressing coleslaw. It is too sharp for delicate lettuce.
Boiled dressings like this one belonged to the long stretch before bottled mayonnaise was a supermarket staple, when a cook who wanted a creamy, tangy salad sauce either emulsified oil and yolks by hand or thickened vinegar with flour or cornstarch over the stove. The flour version was cheaper, kept far better in an unrefrigerated pantry, and suited the vinegar-forward palate that also produced the era's catsups and pickles. Its appearance in the Five Roses Cook Book is no accident: the book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its flour, and recipes that used flour for something other than bread — as a thickener, a binder, a dressing — did quiet advertising work on every page.