Home › Salads › French Dressing
French Dressing
1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper 4 tablespoons oil 2 tablespoons vinegar Mix the salt and pepper, add the oil slowly, stirring constantly; add the vinegar. This rule with a green salad will serve six persons. For cooked vegetables use twice or three times the measure.
A textbook 2:1 vinaigrette from the era before bottled dressings. The proportions still work; the technique is where a modern cook can improve on it.
- The hinge: emulsify last, not firstAdding oil to dry salt and pepper does little, since salt dissolves in vinegar rather than oil. Dissolve the salt in the vinegar first, then whisk the oil in slowly; the dressing will come together more evenly, though without an emulsifier it will still separate before long.
- Which oil"Oil" in a 1900s American cook book usually meant olive oil, though cottonseed and later corn oil were sold as cheaper substitutes. Any neutral oil works; a good olive oil is what the ratio was built around.
- Which vinegarThe recipe does not specify one; cider and wine vinegars were both in domestic use. Modern table vinegar is usually about 5 percent acetic acid; historical strengths varied, so taste and adjust rather than assuming the 2:1 ratio transfers exactly.
- YieldSix tablespoons total, which the book says will dress a green salad for six. Dress at the last moment and toss until the leaves shine rather than pool.
- "Twice or three times the measure"The book simply calls for a doubled or tripled batch for cooked vegetables, without saying why. Dressing them while still warm is a reasonable modern approach, as the flavour carries further than it will on raw greens.
- Optional additionsThe rule is bare, while contemporary cook books commonly listed mustard, sugar, paprika and grated onion as separate variations. Half a teaspoon of Dijon both seasons the dressing and helps the emulsion hold.
French dressing in American cook books of this period meant exactly this: oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, shaken or stirred, and nothing else. The name distinguished it from "mayonnaise dressing" and from the flour-thickened boiled dressings that were common in households where oil was expensive and keeping qualities mattered. The sweetened, tomato-tinted orange bottle that Americans now call French dressing is a later commercial product and has no relationship to this formula. Gold Medal's inclusion of it in the salads chapter belongs to a moment around the turn of the century when milling companies published cook books partly to sell flour and partly to teach a standardized, measured, domestic-science approach to cooking; a plain rule stated in level teaspoons, with a serving count attached, is that program in miniature.