Home › Salads and Salads Dressings › Club French Dressing
Club French Dressing
1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper 2 tablespoons brandy 2 tablespoons Tarragon vinegar 2 tablespoons olive oil Mix ingredients and stir until well blended.
A sharp, spirit-laced vinaigrette of the club-dining school, built on equal parts oil, vinegar and brandy. It is far more acidic than a modern dressing, and it is meant to be.
- YieldSix tablespoons, enough to dress a salad for two to three. It scales up cleanly by multiplication.
- The ratioModern vinaigrette runs three parts oil to one part acid. Here the oil is outnumbered two to one by vinegar and brandy together. Expect something bracing rather than rich; it suits bitter chicories, crisp romaine and cold cooked vegetables better than tender leaf lettuce, which it will quickly wilt.
- Dissolve the salt firstStir the salt and pepper into the vinegar and brandy before the oil goes in. Salt will not dissolve in oil, and once the mixture is beaten together the grains simply sit in it.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, though often weak. A white wine vinegar in which a few bruised tarragon sprigs have steeped for a week is closer to what the book assumes.
- BrandyAny decent unflavoured grape brandy or cognac. It is uncooked here, so the alcohol stays; the dressing tastes noticeably of it. Half the quantity, made up with more oil, gives a more familiar balance if that is wanted.
- Olive oilThe oil such books generally assumed was a milder, less assertive imported one than is common now. A grassy, peppery modern extra-virgin may fight the tarragon and the brandy rather than support them.
- Mixing and holdingWhisk or shake in a sealed jar to get a temporary emulsion; with this much acid it will separate quickly, so shake again at the table. Dress the salad immediately before serving.
French dressing, in American usage, meant nothing more than oil, vinegar and seasoning shaken together bbottled sweetened versions came later. The "club" prefix in such names is generally taken to point at the men's dining clubs and hotel grills of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose kitchens gave their names to a number of dishes carried home in cookbooks of this kind. The brandy is the signature: adding a spirit to a salad dressing was a restaurant flourish, and tarragon vinegar was a fashionable aromatic vinegar of the period, common in American salad chapters.