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Salad Dressing (Egg T flour T Coleman's)
1 egg 1½ T flour 1/2 T Coleman's mustard 3 T sugar Little salt Mix and add 1 C milk ½ C vinegar Piece of butter size of small egg Cook in double boiler until thick. Thin with whipped cream or milk as wanted.
Laura Mae Grummitt.
A boiled salad dressing of the type that preceded bottled mayonnaise in Midwestern kitchens — tart, mustardy, thickened with both flour and egg. The abbreviations are the main obstacle.
- Decoding the abbreviationsT is tablespoon and C is cup: 1½ tablespoons flour, ½ tablespoon dry mustard, 3 tablespoons sugar, 1 cup milk, ½ cup vinegar. Capital T for tablespoon and lowercase t for teaspoon was a common convention in community cook books, though not applied consistently.
- Colman's mustardColeman's is a misspelling of Colman's, the English brand of dry mustard powder still sold in the yellow tin. Use dry powder, not prepared mustard from a jar — prepared mustard is mostly vinegar and will slacken the dressing.
- Butter the size of a small eggSomewhere in the region of 1½ to 2 ounces, or 3 to 4 tablespoons. Older books often measured butter by comparison, from a time when it was cut from a crock rather than a wrapped stick.
- Mix the dry things firstWhisk flour, sugar, mustard and salt with the egg into a smooth paste before any liquid goes in. Add the milk gradually, then the vinegar last; acid poured onto milk all at once will curdle it visibly, though the flour usually pulls it back together as it cooks.
- The double boiler is not optionalEgg plus vinegar over direct heat scrambles into curds. Simmering water under the bowl holds the mixture below boiling so the starch swells and the egg thickens without setting into lumps. Whisk more or less constantly; expect ten minutes or so to reach the consistency of pouring custard.
- Cook it through"Until thick" is the correct doneness cue; by the time a flour-thickened dressing coats a spoon it has comfortably passed the 160F at which egg is set. Do not pull it off early to keep it thin — thin it afterward instead.
- Thinning and storingChill before thinning with milk or whipped cream; the dressing tightens considerably as it cools. Makes roughly two cups, enough for a large bowl of cabbage slaw or potato salad. Keep it refrigerated.
Boiled dressing was the everyday American salad sauce well into the twentieth century, and it survived alongside commercial mayonnaise because it was cheap, kept better, and suited the vegetables people actually ate — shredded cabbage, cold potatoes, sliced cucumber, wilted leaf lettuce with bacon. It used one egg where mayonnaise used several yolks and a cup of oil, and flour did the work oil could not afford to do. It was understood as a sharp vinegar preparation, closer kin to a mustard pickle than to a vinaigrette. Community cook books like this one collected recipes under the contributor's name, which is why the page reads as Laura Mae Grummitt's particular proportions rather than a general formula.