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Fruit Salad Dressing (C fruit juice any kind C lemon)
2/3 C fruit juice (any kind) 2/3 C lemon juice 1 C sugar 4 eggs Mix together and cook until thick. Thin with whipped cream. Gladys Suydam. 1 T butter 1 t flour (heaping) 12 t mustard 12 t salt
A cooked egg-and-citrus dressing of the kind that community cookbooks filed under salads, relishes and anything else that went alongside the main plate. It is essentially a lemon curd, thinned with cream, spooned over cut fruit.
- The stray last lineThe butter, flour, mustard and salt at the end belong to a different dressing — a boiled or cooked mayonnaise-style one — and have been run together with this recipe in the original setting. Mustard and flour have no place in a fruit dressing; ignore that line.
- Reading the abbreviationsC is cup, T is tablespoon, t is teaspoon. The "12 t" in the stray line is almost certainly a flattened 1/2 teaspoon.
- Cook it gentlyThis is the hinge. Four eggs with sugar and acid will scramble over direct heat. Use a double boiler or a heavy pan over low heat, stirring constantly, and pull it at the point where it coats a spoon — around 170-175F. Straining it once off the heat catches any threads.
- Whole eggs, not yolksUsing all four whole eggs gives a lighter, paler set than a yolk-only curd, and it thickens sooner. Do not wait for pudding thickness or it will be grainy.
- Which fruit juice"Any kind" in a community cookbook of this sort most often meant the drained syrup from canned pineapple, peaches or fruit cocktail. Pineapple is the classic partner here; if using fresh pineapple juice, note that its bromelain attacks egg protein until heat inactivates it, so do not let the mixture stand before cooking.
- Thinning with creamChill the cooked base completely first, then fold in whipped cream — about 1/2 to 1 cup, to taste — just before serving. Added warm, the cream deflates and the dressing goes soupy.
- Yield and keepingMakes roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups before the cream, enough to dress fruit for eight to twelve. The uncreamed base keeps four or five days covered in the refrigerator; once the cream is in, use it the same day.
Cooked dressings like this one are a relic of the era before bottled mayonnaise, when any dressing that was not simply oil and vinegar had to be thickened on the stove with eggs, flour, or both. The sweet version — eggs, sugar and citrus, lightened with whipped cream — was a common accompaniment to the American fruit salad of canned pineapple, pears, cherries and marshmallows served at church suppers and ladies' luncheons through the middle of the twentieth century. The signature, Gladys Suydam, is characteristic of a book like this — the recipes were valued as much for whose they were as for what they made.