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Salad Dressing Without Oil
2 eggs 1/2 teaspoon mustard 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons vinegar 1 tablespoon sugar Beat the eggs, add the mixed seasonings, beat a little more, then add the melted butter and vinegar. Set the bowl over boiling water and stir constantly until thick and smooth. Use cold, add a cup of cream, whipped very stiff, before serving.
This is a boiled dressing — the standard American answer to mayonnaise before bottled oil dressings were cheap and reliable. The whole recipe turns on cooking the egg gently enough that it thickens without scrambling.
- The hinge: gentle heat"Set the bowl over boiling water" means a double boiler with the bowl above the water, not sitting in it. Stir constantly and pull it off when it coats the spoon; egg mixtures of this kind generally thicken somewhere around 170-180F, and much past that they curdle.
- If it does breakPush it through a fine sieve while still warm, or blitz it briefly. A slightly grainy base disappears once the whipped cream goes in, but a badly scrambled one does not.
- "Mixed seasonings"Combine the mustard, salt and sugar before adding them to the eggs. Mustard in recipes of this kind is usually the dry powder rather than prepared mustard from a jar, and it wants a moment in liquid before use.
- VinegarVinegar sold today runs about 5 percent acidity; household vinegar of the period varied more than that, so cider or plain white both work, but anything sweet or aged will read sharper or duller than intended — taste before you chill it.
- CreamA cup of cream whipped "very stiff" means heavy or whipping cream, roughly 30-36 percent fat. Ultra-pasteurized whips more slowly but holds fine. Fold it in, do not beat it in, or you lose the volume that makes this dressing worth the trouble.
- ButterUse unsalted if you can and taste for salt at the end; a teaspoon of salt is a lot for this quantity if the butter is salted too.
- Yield and useRoughly two and a half to three cups once the whipped cream is folded in — enough for a large fruit, cabbage or potato salad for six to eight. The cooked base keeps a few days covered in the refrigerator; add the cream only just before serving, since it will weep on standing.
Boiled dressings like this one belong to a line of salad sauces that thickened with egg and a little flour or butter rather than with emulsified oil, a form found in American and British cookery alike. They were the practical choice in kitchens where good salad oil was expensive, went rancid quickly, or was simply not stocked — the title's insistence on "without oil" is the selling point, not an apology. The whipped cream folded in at the end pushes it toward the sweet, tangy dressing that dressed fruit salads and slaws through the first half of the twentieth century, the same family that later hardened into commercial sandwich spread.