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Lactiola Dressing
1 t mustard 4 T butter 1 T flour 1 t salt Pinch of cayenne 1 C milk ½ C vinegar 3 eggs Heat butter in pan add flour and stir until smooth. Then add milk and boil. Beat eggs, salt, pepper, sugar and mustard together and add vinegar, mix with boiling mixture and stir until it thickens like soft custard.
Mrs. A. W. Waldo.
A boiled salad dressing of the cooked-custard type, the standard American alternative to oil-and-vinegar mayonnaise before bottled dressing. The printed ingredient list has clearly been mangled in typesetting, so read it carefully before starting.
- The missing quantitiesThe method calls for butter and flour, but neither appears in the ingredient list, and no salt, pepper, sugar or mustard quantity is given for the first dressing. For a cup of milk, comparable boiled dressings of the period use about 1 tablespoon butter and 1 to 2 tablespoons flour, with a teaspoon each of sugar and dry mustard and half a teaspoon of salt. Treat those as reconstruction, not as the original.
- Two recipes, not oneThe trailing block — 4 eggs, ½ cup sugar, scant ¾ cup vinegar, juice of 2 lemons — has no method of its own and almost certainly belongs to a separate dressing that has run into this entry. It should not be read as an addition to the first mixture.
- C means cupThroughout these church books C is a standard 8 fl oz cup. A "scant" cup or three-quarters cup means just short of the line, not a level measure.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold cider vinegar of this period was not standardised and was often weaker and softer than today's 5 percent supermarket vinegar. Half a cup of modern distilled white vinegar to one cup of milk is likely to read as sharp; cider vinegar is probably closer to the intended flavour.
- The hinge: temper, do not dumpAdding beaten eggs straight into boiling white sauce scrambles them. Whisk a ladle of the hot milk mixture into the egg-and-vinegar blend first, return it to the pan, and hold it below a simmer until it coats a spoon. The acid also makes curdling faster than in plain custard.
- Doneness"Thickens like soft custard" is around 175-180F. It sets further as it cools, so pull it while it still pours.
- Yield and keepingRoughly 2 cups, enough for a large potato salad, cabbage slaw or a cold chicken salad. Refrigerate and use within three or four days; the flour-thickened base does not keep like commercial mayonnaise.
Boiled dressing belongs to the era before an emulsion of raw yolk and oil was a routine or cheap thing to make at home. Salad oil was comparatively expensive and could arrive rancid in inland American towns, while milk, eggs, butter, flour and vinegar were all at hand, so cooks built a thickened cooked sauce that did the same job and kept longer in a cool pantry. Recipes of this kind are common in the salad and relish sections of Midwestern church and society cookbooks of the period, usually under a contributor's name and sometimes with a coined or fanciful title. "Lactiola" looks like one of those invented names, and may have been formed from the Latin lac, milk — though that reading is guesswork, not documented. The Libertyville Presbyterian book, like its counterparts, was compiled and sold to raise money for the congregation, and its authority rests on the women whose names sit under each entry.