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Boiled Dressing II
Yolks 4 eggs 1/2 cup olive oil 4 tablespoons vinegar 1 tablespoon lemon juice 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 3 teaspoons powdered sugar 1 pint whipped cream Beat yolks of eggs slightly, add gradually one-half of the oil and lemon juice. Cook in double boiler until mixture thickens; chill, and add gradually remaining oil, salt, and sugar. Just before serving add cream.
A cooked egg-yolk dressing enriched with oil and lightened at the last moment with whipped cream — closer to a mayonnaise-custard hybrid than to the flour-thickened boiled dressings elsewhere in the period.
- The hinge: gentle heatThe yolks must thicken over barely simmering water, stirred constantly, and come off the heat the moment the mixture coats the spoon. Direct heat or a hard boil will scramble them and no amount of beating will bring the emulsion back.
- A safe temperature for yolksThe usual guideline for cooked egg mixtures is 160F on an instant-read thermometer; the custard will generally be thickening somewhere in this range. Pasteurisation depends on time as well as temperature, so treat 160F as the practical target rather than a precise threshold.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this date "powdered sugar" usually means a fine granulated sugar rather than the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Superfine (caster) sugar is the nearest match; confectioners' sugar will work but adds a faint starchiness.
- The vinegarFour tablespoons of vinegar are listed but never assigned a step. Add it with the lemon juice at the start if you want it cooked in, or beat it into the chilled base before the cream; the second gives a sharper, fresher dressing.
- "1 pint whipped cream"Read this as a pint of heavy cream measured before whipping, whipped to soft peaks — about 4 cups whipped. That is a great deal of cream against four yolks; half the quantity makes a dressing that still tastes of egg and vinegar rather than of dairy.
- Add the cream last, and coldFold it in off the heat, into a thoroughly chilled base, just before the dressing goes to table. Folded in early it is liable to weep and separate on standing.
- Yield and useWith the full pint of cream this makes something over a quart (roughly five cups). It suits fruit, chicken and Waldorf-type salads better than green leaves, being sweetened and very rich.
- StorageThe cooked base alone keeps three or four days covered in the refrigerator. Once the cream is folded in, use it the same meal.
"Boiled dressing" in American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries covered a family of cooked salad sauces that stood in for mayonnaise, which was often described as troublesome to make and costly in oil. Most versions leaned on flour or cornstarch and vinegar; this one takes the richer route, cooking the yolks with oil and lemon into a custard and then extending it with whipped cream — a pattern found in the sweet cream dressings served with fruit and molded salads in the following decades.