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Boiled Salad Dressing
1 t salt. 1 t mustard. 2 T sugar. 2 T butter or oil. Few grains cayenne 2½ T flour Yolks 2 eggs ¾ C scalded milk 1/2 C hot vinegar Mix salt, mustard, oil, sugar and cayenne. Add yolks and mix thoroughly. Stir flour with 1 T cold water until smooth, add a little of scalded milk, stir, then pour into scalded milk. Cook in double boiler, stirring until thickened. Pour into the yolk mixture and return to double boiler and add hot vinegar. Stir constantly until it thickens. If cooked too long it will curdle.
Minnie Dymond.
A cooked (rather than emulsified) salad dressing of the sort that stood in for mayonnaise before electric beaters and cheap oil. The printed ingredient list has clearly lost its first few lines, so treat this as a method rather than a formula.
- The missing quantitiesThe instructions call for salt, mustard, oil, sugar and cayenne, but the list gives amounts only for flour, egg yolks, milk and vinegar. Comparable boiled dressings often use something on the order of a teaspoon each of salt and dry mustard, a tablespoon of oil or melted butter and a tablespoon or two of sugar, but the original figures are simply not recoverable from this page.
- "34 C" is a broken fractionAlmost certainly 3/4 cup scalded milk, which is a plausible proportion against 2 1/2 tablespoons flour and two yolks. A literal 34 cups would be absurd.
- T and CT is a level tablespoon, C a cup of 8 fluid ounces. The milk and vinegar alone come to a cup and a quarter, so the finished dressing is nearer a cup and a half -- enough for a large potato or cabbage salad.
- Mustard means dry mustardIn a dry-ingredient blend of this kind, a recipe calling simply for "mustard" most likely means mustard powder rather than prepared mustard. Mixing it with the sugar and salt first prevents lumps.
- Scalded milkHeated to about 180F, just until a rim of bubbles forms at the edge of the pan. Scalding raw milk was variously explained as killing off bacteria and deactivating enzymes; in practice here the hot milk also brings the flour paste up to thickening temperature faster.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmerThe warning about curdling is the whole point of the double boiler. Once the yolks are in, hold the water beneath at a bare simmer and stir constantly; the dressing thickens at roughly 175 to 180F and the yolks will scramble not far above that.
- Add the vinegar hot and lastCold acid dropped into a hot yolk mixture is liable to curdle it. Heating the vinegar separately and stirring it in at the end keeps the dressing smooth, and the final cooking brings the eggs through their thickening range.
- StorageCover the surface with plastic wrap to stop a skin forming, chill, and use within about four days. It stiffens considerably when cold and can be loosened with a spoonful of milk or cream.
Boiled dressing was the workhorse salad sauce of American church and community cookbooks from the late nineteenth century through the Second World War. Like the vinegar-based condiments it often sat beside, it was made in quantity and kept in a jar. Its appeal was economy and reliability: two yolks and a spoonful of flour stretched much further than the cup of oil a true mayonnaise demanded, and a starch-thickened base did not break the way a hand-whisked emulsion could in a warm kitchen. The tangy, faintly sweet result is generally seen as a forerunner of the bottled "salad dressing" sold alongside mayonnaise today, and it is what older recipes mean when they call for dressing on potato salad, cole slaw or wilted lettuce. Minnie Dymond's contribution is typical of the genre, down to the closing warning about curdling.