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Salad Dressing (Put one tumbler vinegar)
Put one tumbler vinegar, and one lump butter, size of an egg, on to boil. Beat up the yolks of three or four eggs, and pour the boiling vinegar over them, stirring all the time; return it to the fire and continue to stir, until it thickens like custard. When it is perfectly cold add one tumblerful cream, into which has been mixed one tablespoonful salt, one tablespoonful mustard, two spoonfuls sugar, and one spoonful bruised celery-seed. Bottle the dressing and it will keep for a month.--Mrs. P.
A boiled dressing of the pre-mayonnaise type: an egg-and-vinegar custard let go cold, then loosened with cream. It is straightforward to make, but two things need attention -- the ambiguous spoon measures and the keeping instruction.
- TumblerA tumbler was a drinking glass, usually reckoned at around 8 fluid ounces in this period, so roughly a cup of vinegar and a cup of cream. That gives something over two cups of dressing, enough for a large bowl of slaw or potato salad several times over.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout two ounces, a quarter cup, near enough. Cookbooks of this period commonly sized butter against eggs and walnuts rather than by weight.
- Mustard means dry powderOne tablespoon of mustard here is ground mustard flour, not prepared jarred mustard. Prepared mustard would give a much weaker, wetter result.
- The spoonfuls are not consistentThe recipe says tablespoonful for salt and mustard, then simply spoonful for the sugar and celery seed. A full tablespoon of salt in two cups of dressing is aggressive by modern palates; start with a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of celery seed and taste as you go.
- The hinge: temper, then never boilPour the hot vinegar into the yolks in a thin stream while whisking hard, then return the pan to low heat -- ideally over simmering water -- and stir until it coats a spoon. If it reaches a boil the yolks scramble and no amount of beating will bring the custard back.
- Cold before the cream"Perfectly cold" is not fussiness. Cream stirred into a warm acid custard tends to thin and separate; cold into cold gives a smooth, pourable dressing.
- Ignore the monthA bottled cream-and-egg dressing kept a month was plausible in a cool Virginia cellar with daily use and a nose to judge by; it is not a standard to follow. Refrigerate and use within three or four days.
- Bruised celery seedCrush the seed in a mortar or under the flat of a knife just before mixing. Whole celery seed contributes little; broken seed is where the flavour is, and it fades within a few days.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia households -- hence the signature "Mrs. P." -- predates commercial bottled mayonnaise, which did not reach American shops until the early twentieth century. Boiled dressings like this one, thickened with egg yolk and sharpened with vinegar rather than emulsified with oil, were more stable than a hand-beaten mayonnaise, and suited the cabbage, potato and cold-meat salads common to the salad course. The cream stirred in at the end does the softening work oil does in mayonnaise; celery seed was a common aromatic for such dressings and still turns up in commercial slaw dressing today.