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Uncooked Salad Dressing (Christina D Kern can Eagle)
Christina D. Kern. 1 can Eagle brand condensed milk 2 eggs Pinch of salt 1½ same can full of vinegar 1 t (level) dry mustard Beat eggs, add salt and mustard. Mix milk and vinegar together and slowly add it to the eggs. Beat all together for three minutes. Place in pint jar. Will keep for months.
Mrs. Fred Mordhorst.
This is a raw-egg dressing intended to be jarred and kept at room temperature for months, and that combination is why it cannot be recommended today. The notes below explain the specific failures rather than how to rescue it.
- The eggs are never cookedNothing in the method brings the eggs above room temperature, and there is no holding time at any temperature at all. Salmonella in shell eggs was not a recognized concern when this was written; it is now, and a three-minute beating does nothing about it.
- "Will keep for months" is the real problemThe recipe directs the finished dressing into a pint jar with no instruction to refrigerate, and no measured acidity. An uncooked egg-and-dairy mixture held at pantry temperature for weeks is a growth medium, and the vinegar here is diluted by a full can of sweetened condensed milk with no way to verify the final pH.
- Condensed milk is not a preservative hereSweetened condensed milk resists spoilage in the sealed can because it is shelf-stable at very high sugar concentration and was heat-treated at the factory. Once opened and thinned with vinegar and raw egg, that protection is gone.
- The can as a measureEagle Brand today is a 14-ounce can. Because sweetened condensed milk is much denser than water, a can holds appreciably less volume than its net weight suggests, and the size of the tin this cook had in front of her cannot be established from the page. What "1½ same can full of vinegar" actually amounted to therefore cannot be pinned down. The proportion is genuinely ambiguous.
- Vinegar strength is unknownHousehold vinegar of this period varied widely in acetic acid content, and cider vinegar from a local barrel was not standardized. There is no way to reconstruct what acidity the original cook actually achieved.
- If you want this style of dressingA current recipe using pasteurized eggs or a cooked base, kept refrigerated and used within days, is the way to get the same sweet-sour creamy result. Use one.
- Two names on one recipeThe heading credits Christina D. Kern and the closing line credits Mrs. Fred Mordhorst. Why both names appear is not clear from the page itself.
Sweetened condensed milk dressings turn up constantly in American community cookbooks from the 1890s through the 1940s, and they exist because the canned milk did three jobs at once: it sweetened, it thickened, and it emulsified without the patience that a hand-beaten mayonnaise demands. Gail Borden patented a process for condensing milk in 1856, and Eagle Brand was the household name for the product for generations afterward, which is why a cook wrote "1 can Eagle brand" rather than a volume. The contrast in these books is usually between "boiled dressing" — a cooked custard of egg, vinegar, and butter — and the "uncooked" kind here, which was prized precisely for being quick and for keeping, or seeming to keep, on the shelf.