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Salad Dressing for Vegetables
Three times as much olive oil as vinegar with three teaspoons catsup. One teaspoon sugar, a pinch of salt and a small amount of onion chopped fine.
Mrs. V. L. Gerred. 1/2 C water 3 T butter 14 C vinegar 14 C sugar 4 T butter 1 T flour 1 t salt 1 t mustard
A plain oil-and-vinegar dressing with ketchup and onion, given in the loose proportional style common to church-supper books. The trailing list of ingredients belongs to a different recipe and should be ignored.
- The stray ingredient listEverything from "1/2 C water" onward is a second, unrelated recipe that has run together with this one in the original printing — the butter, flour and mustard point to a cooked boiled dressing. It has no instructions attached and no place in this vinaigrette.
- Working proportionsThree parts oil to one part vinegar makes a soft, oil-forward dressing. A practical batch is 6 tablespoons olive oil to 2 tablespoons vinegar, with the other seasonings to taste.
- Catsup in 1900Catsup -- Bottled tomato ketchups of the period were often thinner and sharper than the modern product, though sweetness varied by maker. Today's ketchup is likely to read sweeter, so consider cutting the added sugar to about half a teaspoon and tasting.
- VinegarThe recipe says only 'vinegar'; cider vinegar is the likely intent for a book of this kind, and supermarket cider vinegar is generally about 5 percent acidity. Balsamic or a mild rice vinegar will change the balance of the three-to-one ratio.
- The onionChop it very fine or grate it — the point is to release juice into the dressing, not to leave crunchy pieces. Letting the onion sit in the vinegar and salt for ten minutes before adding oil takes the raw edge off.
- EmulsifyingThere is no mustard or egg here to hold the mixture together, so it will separate within minutes. Shake it in a jar immediately before pouring.
- ServingBetter suited to cooked cold vegetables — beans, beets, asparagus, potatoes — than to tender leaves, though the recipe does not specify. Dress them while still slightly warm so they absorb the oil.
Community cookbooks like this one, sold by church societies to raise funds, are often said to have reproduced contributors' recipes with little editing, which may be why the measurements here are ratios rather than amounts and why an unrelated fragment has been set in the same paragraph. The ketchup is the telling detail: by the turn of the twentieth century commercially bottled tomato ketchup was a fixture of the American pantry, and cooks folded it into dressings, sauces and meat glazes as a ready source of sweetness, acid and color.