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Condensed Milk Salad Dressing
Beat 1 egg until thick and lemon colored, and add 1/2 teaspoon mustard 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper and 1/2 1/2 teaspoon paprika, then add 1/3 cup vinegar 1/3 cup condensed milk and 1/4 cup melted butter. Beat thoroughly, but do not cook. Chill before serving.
This is a boiled-dressing formula with the boiling left out: the egg is the only thickener and the instruction is explicit that it must not be cooked. That is the reason it cannot be recommended today, and the notes below explain the specifics.
- The raw egg never reaches a safe temperatureThe whole egg is beaten in and the dressing is then only chilled. Salmonella in a shell egg is killed by holding the mixture at about 160F, which this method deliberately avoids. Cooked salad dressings of the same era achieve that in a double boiler; this one does not.
- The acid is not sufficient protectionVinegar in this proportion cannot be assumed to bring the mixture to a pH that would reliably control pathogens, and the milk and egg proteins buffer the acid rather than adding to it. Chilling only slows growth. Use a current recipe for a cooked dressing, or a mayonnaise made with pasteurised egg.
- "Condensed milk" means sweetened"Condensed milk" most likely means sweetened -- In American cookbooks of this period condensed milk usually denotes the sweetened, syrupy canned product rather than evaporated milk, though the terms were not always used consistently. If so, its sugar would account for the absence of any separate sweetening in a formula that otherwise resembles a boiled dressing.
- Paprika as seasoning, not colourPaprika -- Half a teaspoon in this quantity contributes mild warmth and a pink-orange tint. Assume a mild sweet paprika; smoked paprika would be out of place.
- YieldThe ingredients total a little over a cup of finished dressing.
- What the technique was forThe instruction to beat but not cook removes the double boiler and the risk of curdling, and that convenience is precisely what removes the safety step.
Books of this kind leaned heavily on canned goods, and sweetened condensed milk was among the most aggressively promoted of them. Shelf-stable, thick and already sweet, it stood in for cream, for a sugar syrup and for part of the thickening in dressings, custards and icebox desserts. The dish itself is a shortcut version of the cooked or "boiled" salad dressing that dominated American tables before bottled mayonnaise became universal: egg, mustard, vinegar and butter, ordinarily thickened over hot water, here simply beaten cold and chilled to set. It is a good record of a moment when speed and canned convenience were the selling points of a recipe, and when the bacteriological caution now attached to uncooked eggs was not yet part of ordinary household advice.