Dressing
To one tumblerful vinegar, warmed in a stewpan, add four beaten eggs; stir for a few minutes till cooked like boiled custard. Then throw in: A teaspoonful of salt. 1 teaspoonful of sugar. 1 teaspoonful of mustard. 1 teaspoonful of pepper. A lump of butter size of half an egg, instead of oil. Stir well and pour out. Will keep for weeks. Good for chicken salad.--Mrs. W.
This is a boiled dressing — the butter-and-vinegar ancestor of mayonnaise, thickened with egg rather than emulsified with oil. It comes together in five minutes, but it curdles just as fast.
- A tumblerfulA tumbler in a nineteenth-century Virginia kitchen held about 8 fluid ounces, so read this as 1 cup of vinegar.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar then was often homemade cider vinegar of uneven acidity, so how it compared with modern bottled vinegar (usually around 5 percent) cannot be known. If it tastes too sharp, cider vinegar cut with a few tablespoons of water softens it.
- The hinge: gentle heatEgg sets at 160-180F, and vinegar makes it set faster and harder. Warm the vinegar only to steaming, never simmering, before the eggs go in, and hold the pan over low heat or a bowl of water while you stir. Boil it and you get sweet-sour scrambled egg that no amount of beating will smooth out.
- "Cooked like boiled custard"The target is a custard that coats the back of a spoon and just holds a line drawn through it. It will look thinner in the pan than it does cold; it firms up considerably as it chills.
- Mustard and pepperMustard here is most likely dry mustard powder rather than the prepared jarred kind. A full teaspoon of ground pepper is aggressive by current taste — half is plenty unless the salad is very plain.
- A lump of butter size of half an eggAbout 1 ounce, or 2 tablespoons. Beat it in off the heat, in pieces, once the custard has thickened; the note "instead of oil" tells you it is standing in for the olive oil of a mayonnaise, and it should melt into the dressing rather than be cooked in it.
- "Will keep for weeks"That assumed a cool cellar or springhouse and a good deal of optimism. Refrigerate it in a covered jar and use it within about five days; the acidity helps, but a cooked-egg dressing with butter in it is not a preserve.
- ServingBest folded into cold diced chicken with celery just before the meal. Chilled, the butter stiffens the dressing, so let it stand at room temperature for a few minutes and stir before dressing the salad.
Boiled dressing of this kind is often said to have been an American standard for chicken and potato salads long before jarred mayonnaise appeared, and it survived in Southern kitchens well into the twentieth century. The reason is embedded in the recipe itself: the instruction to use butter "instead of oil" acknowledges that good olive oil was expensive, imported, and prone to arriving rancid, while eggs, vinegar and butter were all at hand. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled from contributions by some two hundred and fifty Virginia housewives, which is why the recipe is written in the shorthand of a cook passing a method to someone who already knows what boiled custard looks like. Chicken salad is generally thought to have become a fixture of Virginia luncheons and church suppers by then, and a keeping dressing that could be made in advance was exactly what a large table required.