Home › Salads and Dressings › Cream Salad Dressing (Yolks of three hard-boiled)
Cream Salad Dressing (Yolks of three hard-boiled)
Yolks of three hard-boiled eggs, Yolk of one raw egg, 2 tablespoonfuls of vinegar, 1 tablespoonful of melted butter, 1 gill of thick cream, 1/2 teaspoonful of salt, ¼ teaspoonful of pepper.
Mash the hard-boiled yolks until perfectly fine and work in gradually the raw yolk. This must be a perfectly smooth paste. Then add the salt, pepper and melted butter. When well blended add by degrees the cream, working and stirring all the while. Then add gradually the vinegar and it is ready to use. Put in a cold place.
This is a cream dressing of the pre-mayonnaise type, thickened with cooked yolks and enriched with one raw one. The raw yolk is the problem: nothing in the method brings it to a safe temperature, and the dressing is then held rather than eaten immediately.
- Why the raw yolk fails hereThe single raw yolk is never heated at any point, and the finished dressing is stored cold rather than used at once. Salmonella in a shell egg is a real risk in an uncooked preparation of this kind, where the small amount of vinegar is not enough to compensate; use a current recipe if you want a cream dressing.
- Not enough acid to matterTwo tablespoonfuls of vinegar against a gill of cream, three cooked yolks and butter is unlikely to bring the mixture anywhere near a pH low enough to inhibit pathogens. Dressings that rely on acid for safety use a far higher proportion of acid to egg, and pasteurised egg is the usual safeguard.
- "Put in a cold place"A cellar, larder or icebox would have been warmer and less reliable than modern refrigeration, and warm enough for bacteria to multiply. The instruction also gives no limit on how long the dressing may be kept.
- A gillHalf a cup, or four fluid ounces. "Thick cream" here is heavy cream, around 36% fat, not the thin pouring cream sold under the same word in some markets.
- The typo"14 teaspoonful of pepper" is almost certainly 1/4 teaspoonful. The same transcription renders "1" as "I" elsewhere in the ingredient list, so fraction bars and numerals in this text should be read with that in mind.
Dressings built on hard-boiled yolks mashed to a paste were the everyday American salad sauce through the second half of the nineteenth century, appearing in household manuals well before jarred mayonnaise was on grocery shelves — commercial mayonnaise in the United States is often said to date from the early decades of the twentieth century. The cooked yolks bulk and thicken the sauce, which made the method forgiving for cooks without a steady hand or a whisk arm. The recipe reflects the period's view of salad as a dressed dish rather than a bowl of leaves.