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Simple Salad Dressing
Two teaspoons of mustard, one and one-half teaspoons of salt, one-eighth teaspoon of cayenne, four eggs, one-half cup of vinegar, one-quarter cup of olive oil. Mix mustard, salt and cayenne, add eggs well beaten. Heat vinegar and oil in the top of the double boiler, when hot pour on to egg mixture, return to double boiler and cook until mixture thickens. Cool and keep in a covered jar; this dressing will keep for weeks. -Maria Willett Howard.
This is a boiled dressing rather than a mayonnaise: the eggs do the thickening and the oil is a flavoring, not an emulsion base. The whole thing hinges on gentle heat.
- Mustard means dry mustardTwo teaspoons of "mustard" in a book of this period is powdered mustard, not prepared table mustard. Mixing it with the salt and cayenne first keeps it from clumping when the liquid goes in.
- Temper, then cook slowlyPouring the hot vinegar and oil onto the beaten eggs in a thin stream while whisking is what keeps the eggs from scrambling. Back in the double boiler, the water beneath should be steaming, not at a rolling boil.
- Know when it is thick enoughPull it off when it coats the back of a spoon and reads about 175-180F, roughly the consistency of pouring custard. It tightens further as it cools, so stopping a shade early is safer than a shade late.
- If it breaksGrainy dressing can usually be rescued by pressing it through a fine sieve while still warm, or a short blitz with an immersion blender. Once it has fully curdled into curds and whey, it will not come back.
- It is sharp by designHalf a cup of vinegar to a quarter cup of oil and no sugar makes a dressing far more acidic than modern palates expect. It suits sturdy things -- cabbage, potato, cold chicken, hard-cooked eggs -- better than tender leaves. A teaspoon of sugar or a spoonful of cream stirred in at the end softens it without changing the method.
- Vinegar strengthCider vinegar of the period varied in strength; most bottled vinegars today are around 5 percent. Use a cider or white wine vinegar rather than anything labeled cleaning strength.
- YieldAbout one and a quarter to one and a half cups, enough to dress salad for eight to ten.
- "Will keep for weeks" assumed a cold cellar"Will keep for weeks" -- Refrigerate it in a clean covered jar and treat it as you would a cooked custard: about a week. The acidity helps, but this is still a cooked egg preparation with no measured preservative.
Boiled dressings like this one were a common American salad sauce well into the twentieth century and appear frequently in household cookbooks alongside true mayonnaise. Olive oil was an expensive import, and a cook could stretch a quarter cup of it with eggs and vinegar into a jar of dressing that kept. A cooked dressing also forgave the unreliable hand -- unlike mayonnaise, it did not need to be beaten drop by drop and would not split irrecoverably in a warm kitchen. Maria Willett Howard, credited here, was a cooking teacher and cookbook author of the era.