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Cream Salad Dressing (Well-made salad)
well-made salad is an exceedingly wholesome dish,-that does not mean the salad containing mustard. Leave the mustard out and almost any one can eat and digest a salad. It is the mustard which makes it unwholesome, but I am sorry to say, Americans seem to prefer unwholesome food. Mash the cooked yolks until perfectly smooth, then rub in the raw yolk. Work with an elastic bladed knife at least five minutes. Add the salt and pepper and the oil drop by drop. Stir rapidly and steadily all the while. Then add by degrees the vinegar and it is ready to use. More oil and vinegar may be added if more dressing is required; it is not necessary to use a greater amount of eggs, but let the oil and vinegar make the quantity.
This is a French-style dressing built on egg yolk rather than a cooked or boiled dressing, and it arrives on the page with its opening scold intact but its ingredient quantities missing. Two things stand in the way of making it.
- Raw yolk, never heatedThe dressing is thickened with one raw egg yolk beaten into mashed cooked yolks, and nothing in the method brings it to a temperature that would kill Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside an intact shell egg. The vinegar goes in last, in unmeasured amounts, and is diluted by the oil; it cannot be relied on as a kill step.
- No quantities surviveThe text as printed gives no measure of yolks, salt, pepper, oil or vinegar, and then invites you to add "more oil and vinegar" freely. There is no way to judge the acidity or the ratio, which is precisely what would matter here. Use a current mayonnaise or cream-dressing recipe instead.
- Keeping and servingNothing in the instruction covers refrigeration or how long the dressing will keep.
- "Elastic bladed knife"A thin, flexible palette knife or spatula, used flat against the bowl to smear the yolks smooth rather than whisk them. The five minutes of rubbing is not padding: it is what breaks down the cooked yolk so the emulsion does not stay grainy.
- The mustard argumentThe opening lines are the author's opinion, not a technical note. Mustard flour in a dressing is a stabiliser and helps hold the emulsion; leaving it out makes the dressing milder and rather more inclined to split.
American cookbooks of the period tend to divide salad dressings into two camps: the boiled or "cooked" dressing, thickened with flour, butter and whole eggs over water, and the French-influenced oil emulsion built on yolks, which is what this is. The hybrid seen here — hard-cooked yolks mashed smooth, then a raw yolk rubbed in — appears in other books of the type; the cooked yolks give body while the raw one does the emulsifying. The little sermon against mustard sits with the era's preoccupation with dyspepsia and "wholesome" eating, when condiments, spices and vinegar were often blamed by domestic-science writers for irritating the stomach. The instruction to stretch a fixed quantity of egg with as much oil and vinegar as you need is sound emulsion practice and still how a cook scales mayonnaise up today.