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Luncheons at Home and by Box: Dressing
French Dressing teaspoonful salt 1/4 tablespoonful lemon teaspoonful paprika juice or vinegar teaspoonful pepper 3 tablespoonfuls oil Drop the dry ingredients into a glassstoppered bottle, add the lemon juice, and give it a shake. Add the oil and shake vigorously for half a minute just before serving on the salad.
Thousand Island Salad Dressing To two thirds of a cupful of mayonnaise dressing add two teaspoonfuls each of chopped green peppers, pimientos, and chives, the sifted yolk of one hard-cooked egg, half a teaspoonful of paprika, tomato catsup, tarragon vinegar, and three tablespoonfuls of chili sauce. Cooked Salad Dressing 1/4 teaspoonful mustard 2 tablespoonfuls vine- 1 teaspoonful paprika cupful cream gar 1/4 teaspoonful salt 2 tablespoonfuls butter 2 egg yolks or 1 whole egg Mix the salt, paprika, and mustard and add the beaten egg, melted butter, and Luncheons at Home and by Box cream. Cook in a double boiler, stirring gently until slightly thickened, add the vinegar slowly, stirring continually until well mixed. Remove from the fire and whip up with the Dover egg beater for just a moment before cooling.
LUNCHES BY BOX Box lunches can be made appetizing by careful packing. Glass jars for salad or cream soup, to be heated up on an alcohol stove or electric plate, and waxed paper for wrapping individual sandwiches, cake, or cookies are essential.
For the lunch to be taken on a hike, a thermos bottle in which to carry hot coffee or hot soup is almost indispensable. Where a cold drink is desired this same bottle can be used equally well. Following are recipes for various sandwiches which are especially suited for box lunches:
Three dressings, transcribed from a small-apartment cookbook and badly served by the scanner: nearly every fraction has dropped out of the ingredient columns. What survives is workable if you know the standard proportions of the period.
- The missing fractionsIn the French dressing the quantities were almost certainly quarter- or half-teaspoons of salt, paprika and pepper against 1 tablespoon acid and 3 tablespoons oil. The cooked dressing's "cupful cream" is likewise a fraction, most plausibly a half cup; it is genuinely ambiguous, so start with half and judge the consistency.
- The 3:1 ratioThree parts oil to one part lemon juice or vinegar is the classic vinaigrette proportion and still the right place to begin. It is sharper than most bottled dressings; add oil by the spoonful if it bites.
- Why the glass-stoppered bottleA tight stopper lets you shake hard enough to force a temporary emulsion, and the half minute "just before serving" matters because that emulsion breaks within a few minutes. A screw-top jar does the same job.
- Thousand Island quantitiesRead the run of ingredients as half a teaspoon each of paprika, tomato catsup and tarragon vinegar. Two-thirds cup of mayonnaise plus the additions makes about a cup, enough for a large salad for four.
- Mayonnaise baseThe book assumes its own mayonnaise dressing, which would have been built on raw yolks. A commercial jarred mayonnaise will serve as the base, though the character of the finished dressing will differ somewhat.
- The hinge: do not let the cooked dressing boilTwo yolks in cream will curdle if the water beneath the double boiler is at a rolling boil or the mixture passes roughly 180F. Keep the water at a bare simmer, stir steadily, and pull it off the heat as soon as it coats the spoon.
- Acid last, and slowlyVinegar added all at once to a hot egg mixture will curdle it. Trickling it in while stirring, as directed, tempers the proteins. The final whipping smooths out any slight graininess.
- Dover egg beaterA hand-cranked rotary beater. A balloon whisk or a stick blender does the same work in less time.
- KeepingThe cooked dressing and the Thousand Island are both perishable: refrigerate and use within three or four days. The French dressing keeps for some days, best refrigerated if made with lemon juice rather than vinegar, and must be reshaken every time.
- On the box lunch noteSalad or cream soup carried in a glass jar and reheated hours later on an alcohol stove sits for a long stretch at room temperature. A vacuum flask filled with the soup already boiling hot, as the book also suggests, is the sounder of the two methods.
Kitchenette cookery belongs to a wave of American books written for the flats and bachelor apartments that spread through cities in the 1910s and 1920s, where the whole kitchen might be a cupboard with a two-burner gas plate. Dressings suit that setting exactly: no oven, one bowl, and a double boiler improvised from a saucepan. Thousand Island dressing is generally traced to the Thousand Islands region of the St. Lawrence River in the first years of the twentieth century, and by the time this book appeared it had settled into the form given here, a mayonnaise reddened with chili sauce and catsup and flecked with pepper, pimiento and egg. The paprika in all three recipes turns up, as it so often does, wherever a cook wanted color without heat. The Dover beater and the glass-stoppered bottle date the page as firmly as any of the ingredients.