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Parisian French Dressing
1/2 cup olive oil 5 tablespoons vinegar 1/2 teaspoon powdered sugar 1 tablespoon finely chopped Bermuda onion 2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley 4 red peppers 8 green peppers 1 teaspoon salt Mix ingredients in the order given. Let stand one hour, then stir vigorously for five minutes. This is especially fine with lettuce, romaine, chicory, or endive. The red and green peppers are the small ones found in pepper sauce.
A sharp, chunky vinaigrette rather than the sweet orange bottled dressing the name suggests today. The one thing to get right is the peppers: they are the pickled ones from a bottle of hot pepper sauce, not fresh chiles or bell peppers.
- The peppers"The small ones found in pepper sauce" means the whole pickled tabasco-type peppers packed in vinegar in old-style bottled sauce. Twelve of them, chopped, give both heat and acidity; a similar effect comes from pickled peppers sold in brine, or from a couple of teaspoons of a vinegar-based hot sauce with some of its pulp.
- Acid ratioHalf a cup of oil to 5 tablespoons vinegar is roughly 1.6 to 1, far sharper than the modern 3 to 1. Vinegar strength was not standardised as it is now, so the original may not have bitten as hard as a modern 5 percent one; taste before dressing greens and cut the vinegar back if it bites.
- Powdered sugarIn books of this period 'powdered' usually meant sugar ground fine, closer to today's superfine or caster than to modern confectioners' sugar, which is cut with cornstarch. Superfine or caster dissolves readily here. The half teaspoon reads as a check on the vinegar rather than as sweetening.
- Bermuda onionA large, mild, flat sweet onion, still sold in some markets but easily replaced by Vidalia, Walla Walla or another sweet onion. A pungent yellow cooking onion will dominate the dressing.
- Standing and stirringThe hour of resting lets the onion, parsley and peppers flavour the oil and vinegar. There is no mustard or egg here, so the five minutes of vigorous stirring makes only a temporary suspension; whisk or shake again immediately before it goes on the greens.
- YieldAbout a cup to a cup and a quarter once the onion, parsley and chopped peppers are counted in. Dress the leaves at the last moment, as the acidity wilts tender lettuce quickly.
- KeepingFresh onion and parsley in oil do not keep well. Make what you need for the meal; refrigerate leftovers no more than a day or two and let them come back to room temperature so the oil clears.
American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries commonly used "French dressing" to mean simply oil, vinegar and seasoning shaken together, as against the thick cooked and mayonnaise dressings that fill the period's salad chapters. Qualifiers like "Parisian" attach to many such household variations, and there is nothing here to tie the dressing to Paris. What helps date this version is the bottled pepper sauce: Louisiana-style sauces of small red peppers in vinegar were on sale by this time, and the recipe's own instruction shows the whole pickled pods in the bottle being used as an ingredient. The suggested greens -- romaine, chicory and endive -- point to the firmer, more bitter leaves.