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Salad Dressing (No. 1)
Four eggs (beaten separately), 2 even tablespoons mustard, 4 tablespoons white sugar, 4 tablespoons butter, ½ cup vinegar, dash of cayenne pepper and salt. Mix well together butter, sugar, mustard, salt.
Add beaten yolks of eggs. Stir in vinegar and beat well. Cook in double boiler till soft like custard. When done, add whites of eggs well beaten. When ready to serve, add cream.
A boiled dressing of the type that preceded bottled mayonnaise: eggs, vinegar and butter thickened over water rather than emulsified with oil. It is simple, but it curdles easily and the finishing step needs attention.
- Mustard means dry powder"Two even tablespoons mustard" is almost certainly ground mustard flour rather than prepared table mustard. Two level tablespoons of dry mustard makes a sharp dressing; start with one if you want it milder, bearing in mind that cooking mellows the pungency somewhat without removing it.
- Vinegar strengthPeriod white vinegar ran around 4 to 5 percent acidity, much the same as today's distilled white. Cider vinegar also works, though the recipe calls for white.
- The hinge: gentle, constant heatThe water in the lower pan should steam, never boil, and the mixture wants stirring the whole time. Take it off when it coats a spoon, around 170F to 175F; past that the yolks scramble and no amount of beating brings the dressing back.
- The egg whitesFolding raw beaten whites into the finished custard leaves them lightly cooked at best. Return the pan to the heat and stir for another minute or two after the whites go in so the whole mixture holds at 160F, or use pasteurized eggs, particularly if it is going to anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised.
- Butter and sugarFour tablespoons of butter is half a stick. Soften it before creaming with the sugar and mustard, or the dry mustard will stay in lumps.
- The cream at the endThe recipe adds cream only at the point of serving; no reason is given. Two to four tablespoons of table cream or half-and-half per cup of dressing brings it to a pourable consistency.
- Yield and keepingRoughly two cups before the cream, enough for a large potato salad or coleslaw. Refrigerate in a covered jar and use within four or five days; it thickens when cold and needs a stir.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its Five Roses flour, and it collected contributions from ordinary Canadian households; the salad chapter carries several numbered dressings that do much the same job in slightly different proportions. Cooked or "boiled" dressings of this kind were the standard North American salad sauce well into the twentieth century: they used butter and eggs, both of which a farm kitchen had, instead of the salad oil that was expensive and often rancid by the time it reached a country store. The mustard-and-vinegar sharpness also suited dishes such as cabbage, cold potato and canned salmon rather than delicate greens. Commercially jarred mayonnaise, sold in North America from the 1910s onward, gradually displaced it, though the same formula survives as the dressing on old-fashioned coleslaw.