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French Dressing with Tomato & Catsup
¼ C vinegar Add salt, paprika, sugar and tomato catsup to taste. Put all into jar, cover and shake frequently. Should be made one-half hour before serving.
Florence Lovell.
This is a church-supper shorthand recipe: the proportions are left to the cook, and the ingredient list has clearly lost something in the printing. Read it as a framework rather than a formula.
- The missing oilA French dressing is an oil-and-vinegar mixture, and no oil appears here. It may have been assumed as understood, or dropped in the printing. Period recipes vary in their proportions: some give three parts oil to one of vinegar, others as little as two to one.
- Quarter cup of vinegarThe printed page reads a quarter cup of vinegar, as our text now gives. No oil is listed, so the proportions are yours to set: three parts oil to one of vinegar is the usual starting point, seasoned to taste after shaking.
- Season to taste means taste itWith salt, paprika, sugar and catsup all unmeasured, the only way through is incremental. Add the sugar and catsup last, a teaspoon at a time, since both push the dressing toward the sweet Thousand Island end quickly.
- Tomato catsup then and nowCommercial catsup of the period was generally thinner and less sweet than modern ketchup. If you use ketchup, expect the finished dressing to be noticeably sweeter, and cut the added sugar accordingly.
- Paprika was the pointPaprika here is most likely for colour and mild warmth rather than heat. A plain sweet or sweet Hungarian paprika is the safer choice; smoked paprika would overwhelm the vinegar.
- The jar and the shakingShaking in a covered jar is still the best method for a temporary emulsion, but it will separate within minutes. The recipe gives no reason for the half-hour rest; it does say to shake frequently, so shake again before it goes to the table.
- YieldThe recipe states no yield. On the reconstruction suggested above -- a quarter cup of vinegar with three-quarters cup of oil -- you would have about a cup, enough to dress a salad for eight.
Congregational and church cook books like this one were compiled by subscription, each contributor sending in a favorite dish under her own name, and the printing was often done cheaply by a local job shop with no editor to catch a dropped ingredient. That is very likely what happened to Florence Lovell's dressing. "French dressing" in American usage had already drifted from the plain oil, vinegar, salt and pepper of the French vinaigrette; by the early twentieth century recipes routinely added sugar, paprika and tomato in some form, and that tomato-tinted, faintly sweet version is the ancestor of the bottled orange French dressing sold today. Its placement under "Pickles-Relishes" rather than with the salads tells you something too: to this compiler it belonged with the vinegar preparations, the things kept in a jar on the shelf.