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Cream Dressing
Mix in double boiler 2 teaspoons flour 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon mustard 1 1/2 teaspoons powdered sugar and a few grains cayenne; add 1 teaspoon butter and 1/3 cup vinegar. Cook over boiling water , string constantly until mixture thickness; add 1 egg yolk, and stir and cook 1 minute. Cool and just before serving add 1/2 cup heavy cram, sweet or sour, beaten until stiff.
A cooked salad dressing of the pre-mayonnaise-jar era: vinegar thickened with flour and a single yolk, then lightened with whipped cream. The original text has several typos ("string" for stirring, "thickness" for thickens, "cram" for cream); read past them.
- The hingeThe yolk goes in only after the vinegar mixture has thickened, and cooks just one minute over water that is boiling below, not touching the bowl. Longer or hotter and the yolk curdles into grains that no amount of beating will smooth out.
- Temper the yolkBeat the yolk in a cup with a spoonful of the hot mixture before returning it to the pan. The recipe does not call for it, but it reduces the chance of the yolk seizing.
- Mustard"1 teaspoon mustard" means dry mustard powder, not prepared mustard from a jar. Prepared mustard would add both vinegar and bulk and throw the balance off.
- Powdered sugarIn American cookbooks of this period "powdered sugar" could mean a fine-ground granulated sugar rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold under that name now. Either dissolves in the hot vinegar, so granulated works here.
- The vinegarA third of a cup is a sharp amount by modern taste, and vinegar strength was less standardised than today's 5 percent. Taste the cooked base before folding in the cream and adjust the sugar if it bites.
- Sour cream"Sour" here means naturally soured heavy cream, closer to today's crème fraîche than to the thick cultured sour cream sold in tubs. Cultured sour cream will not whip; use heavy cream, or fold in crème fraîche unwhipped and accept a looser dressing.
- Assembly and timingThe base must be fully cold before the whipped cream goes in, or the cream deflates. Fold at the last moment, as the recipe says; it will not hold once combined.
- YieldSomething over a cup once the whipped cream is folded in, enough to dress fruit, chicken or cabbage salad for four to six.
Boiled or cooked dressings like this one belong to a long American tradition that predates commercial mayonnaise: cheaper than an oil emulsion, more stable in a warm pantry, and forgiving of cooks who had never mastered a slow-dribbled yolk. The flour does the structural work an emulsion would otherwise do, and the whipped cream folded in at the end lifts it from everyday to company fare. The mustard-sugar-cayenne triad is the standard flavoring of the type, and a similar base, without the cream, dressed potato and cabbage salads in American households well into the middle of the twentieth century.