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Salads: Dressing
DRESSING OR SAUCES FOR SALADS French Dressing. 1 tablespoonful vinegar, 4 tablespoonfuls olive oil, 4 teaspoonful salt, teaspoonful pepper.
Put the salt and pepper in the salad bowl, or in a small bowl if the sauce is to be served separately. Add a little oil, stir well, then gradually add the remainder of the oil, beating constantly. Last of all stir in the vinegar, which should be diluted with water in very strong. This dressing may be modified to suit different vegetables. Cooked Salad Dressing. 2 eggs, cupful vinegar, 1 cupful milk, 1 tablespoonful oil or butter, 1 teaspoonful salt, teaspoonful pepper.
Put the oil and dry ingredients in a bowl and mix well. Add the eggs, and beat for five minutes. Now add the milk, place the bowl in a pan of boiling water, and cook till the sauce thickens like thin cream. Stir the sauce constantly while cooking, and bottle what you do not require for immediate use. If butter is substituted for oil, add it just before taking the dressing from the fire. Sour-Cream Dressing. 1 cupful sour cream, 2 tablespoonfuls lemon juice, 2 tablespoonfuls vinegar, 1 scant tablespoonful sugar, 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 teaspoonful pepper, 1 teaspoonful mixed mustard.
Beat the cream with an egg beater until thick. Mix the other ingredients and gradually add the cream, beating all the while. 1 cupful cream, cupful tomato catsup, 2 tablespoonfuls olive oil, 2 tablespoonfuls vinegar, 1 tablespoonful sugar, 1 teaspoonful salt.
Mix the dry ingredients, oil, salt, and vinegar together, then add the catsup and cream, beating it in gradually.
Cream Dressing. tablespoonful salt, tablespoonful mustard, tablespoonful sugar, 1 egg slightly beaten, 2 tablespoonfuls melted butter, cupful sugar, 4 cupful vinegar.
Mix dry ingredients, add vinegar very slowly. Cook over boiling water, stirring until the mixture thickens, strain, and cool. Add before using it an equal quantity of whipped cream.
Chicken-Salad Dressing. cupful rich chicken broth, cupful vinegar, Yolks 5 eggs, 2 tablespoonfuls mixed mustard, 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 teaspoonful pepper, Few grains cayenne, cupful thick cream, cupful melted butter.
Reduce stock in which a fowl has been cooked to½ cupful. Add vinegar, yolks of eggs slightly beaten, mustard, salt, pepper, and cayenne.
Cook over boiling water, stirring constantly until mixture thickens. Strain, add cream and melted butter, then cool. FANNIE M. FARMER.
Oil Dressing, Boiled. 1½ teaspoonfuls mustard, 1 teaspoonful salt, 2 teaspoonfuls powdered sugar, Dash McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce 2 tablespoonfuls oil, SALADS a cupful vinegar diluted with cold water to make cupful, eggs slightly beaten.
Mix dry ingredients, add egg and oil gradually, stirring constantly until thoroughly blended; then add diluted vinegar. Cook over boiling water until mixture thickens Tomato Mayonnaise. 2 solid tomatoes, Yolks 2 hard-boiled eggs, Yolk 1 raw egg, cupful oil. 2 drops Sauce, McIlhenny's Tabasco 3 drops onion juice.
Peel the tomatoes; cut them in halves and press out all the seeds, retaining the solid portion. Chop and press through a sieve. Mash the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs until very fine; add the yolk of the raw egg; when thoroughly mixed, add the oil a little at a time. When thick and smooth, add the dry pulp of the tomato (which has been draining while you are making the dressing). Add the tabasco and onion juice. This is a delicious dressing for cold beef or mutton.
A page of seven dressings, badly served by the scanner: nearly every fraction has dropped out of the ingredient lists, so "cupful vinegar" and "4 teaspoonful salt" are missing their numerators. Read the proportions below as guidance and trust your palate over the printed figures.
- The missing fractionsWhere a quantity looks impossible — "4 teaspoonful salt", or sugar listed twice over in the Cream Dressing — the original almost certainly read 1/4, 1/8 or 1/2. The Cream Dressing list is the worst affected and cannot be reconstructed with confidence; work from the Cooked Salad Dressing instead, which lost fewer figures.
- French dressing ratioOne part vinegar to four parts oil is a milder dressing than the modern 1:3 default, and the instruction to dilute the vinegar if it is very strong points to household vinegars of unstandardised strength, some of them sharper than today's usual 5 percent acidity. With supermarket wine vinegar you can probably skip the water.
- Mixed mustard"Mixed mustard" means mustard powder already made up with water or vinegar — in other words prepared mustard from a jar. Where the recipe says mustard among the dry ingredients, that is the dry powder.
- The hinge: cooked dressings must not boilEvery boiled dressing here sits in a bowl over boiling water rather than on direct heat, and that is the whole technique. Egg and vinegar together curdle fast; keep the water at a bare simmer, stir without stopping, and pull the bowl the moment the sauce coats the spoon like thin cream. Straining afterwards, as two of these direct, catches any threads that do form.
- Bottling and keeping"Bottle what you do not require" assumed a cool larder and quick turnover. These are milk-, cream- and egg-based sauces with no preservative beyond vinegar: refrigerate and use within three or four days.
- Sour cream then and nowPeriod sour cream was generally cream soured naturally rather than a standardised cultured product, and its thickness and sharpness would have varied. Commercial sour cream will not whip to thickness with an egg beater as instructed; either use it as it comes and simply beat the seasonings in, or thin it slightly with cream.
- Pepper quantitiesA full teaspoon of pepper in a cup of cream is heavy by current taste and probably another casualty of the lost fractions. Start with a quarter teaspoon.
- Tomato mayonnaise and raw yolkThis one is never heated. Use pasteurised eggs if serving it to anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised. Drain the sieved tomato pulp hard, as directed, or the emulsion will slacken and separate.
- Tabasco"McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce" is essentially the Tabasco still sold today, named in full as branded bottled sauces often were in recipe lists of the period. Two or three drops need not be a misprint; this is a sauce used by the drop.
Two traditions sit side by side on the page: the oil-and-vinegar dressing, called "French" — a name traditionally explained by the French origin of the technique — and the cooked or "boiled" dressing, a form particularly associated with American kitchens, where imported oil was costly and cooks were more at home with butter and cream. The chicken-salad dressing is credited to Fannie Merritt Farmer, whose Boston Cooking-School Cook Book appeared in 1896 and made her one of the most widely quoted cookery authorities in the country. The naming of McIlhenny's Tabasco — made in Louisiana since the late 1860s — is a small sign of the era in which branded bottled sauces began appearing in recipe lists as ingredients in their own right.