Home › Salads of Meat, Fish, Vegetables and Fruit › Boiled Salad Dressing
Boiled Salad Dressing
One and one-half teaspoons of mustard, one and one-half teaspoons of salt, two teaspoons of flour, one-half teaspoon of paprika, one-eighth teaspoon of cayenne, one and one-half teaspoons of melted butter, two egg yolks, one-quarter cup of vinegar. Mix ingredients in order given in the top of a double boiler, cook over hot water, until thick like soft custard, pour immediately into cold bowl and add one-half cup of cream which has been beaten until stiff.
A cooked dressing of the type that preceded jarred mayonnaise in most American kitchens — thickened with egg yolk and a little flour rather than emulsified with oil. The whipped cream folded in at the end makes it closer to a sauce for fruit or chicken salad than a sharp vinaigrette.
- The mustard is dry"Mustard" in a 1900s dressing means English or Colman's-style mustard powder, not prepared mustard from a jar. Using prepared mustard adds vinegar and water and will slacken the base.
- Cook to custard, not beyondThe hinge of the recipe. Over water at a bare simmer, the yolks begin to thicken somewhere around 160-170°F; the flour gives some protection, but pushed too far the mixture will curdle. Whisk constantly and pull it off the heat while it still slides off the spoon in a thick ribbon.
- Why the cold bowl mattersThe instruction to pour immediately into a cold bowl is not decorative. Residual heat in the double boiler pan can carry the eggs past setting point.
- Vinegar strengthA quarter cup of vinegar against two yolks is assertive by modern standards. Household vinegar of the period was less consistent in strength than today's standardised bottled vinegars; taste before committing to the full quantity.
- Fold, do not stir, the creamThe half cup of cream is measured before whipping, and the recipe asks for it beaten stiff. It goes in as soon as the base has been poured into the cold bowl; the cooler the base by then, the less the cream will deflate.
- No sugarMany boiled dressings of the era carry a teaspoon or two of sugar. This one does not, which makes it better suited to chicken, meat and vegetable salads than to fruit.
- Yield and keepingEnough to dress a salad for four to six. The cream-enriched dressing does not hold well; make it the day it is used and keep it refrigerated.
Boiled dressing belongs to the long stretch of American cookery before commercial mayonnaise was widely available, when a household wanting a creamy salad sauce made one from eggs, a starch and vinegar over hot water rather than beating oil into yolks by hand. It was cheaper than mayonnaise, kept its body better in a warm kitchen, and forgave the cook who had no ice. Recipes of this kind fill the salad chapters of turn-of-the-century American cookbooks, usually in several versions — some with milk and flour, some with sugar, some, like this one, lightened with whipped cream for serving with cold fowl or a moulded vegetable salad. The paprika and cayenne together are typical of the period's taste for a dressing that read as "piquant" without being genuinely hot.