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Boiled Cream Dressing
1 teaspoon mustard 1 teaspoon paprika 3 egg yolks 2 tablespoons flour 1/4 cup vinegar 1 cup cream Melt butter; add flour, seasonings, egg and vinegar; cook until thick; add beaten cream. Beat well, chill, and serve. 3 eggs 1 tablespoon oil 1 tablespoon salt
The printed ingredient list here is plainly garbled — butter appears in the method but never in the list, and a second cluster of quantities (3 eggs, oil, salt) has drifted in from a neighboring recipe. What survives is a standard boiled salad dressing of the period, and it works if you read it with a cook's eye.
- The hinge: never let it boilOnce the yolks are in, the mixture must be cooked gently — a double boiler or very low direct heat, stirring constantly — only until it coats a spoon and thickens. A hard boil scrambles the yolks and no amount of beating recovers a smooth dressing.
- The missing butterThe method opens "Melt butter" with no quantity given. For 2 tablespoons of flour, 2 tablespoons of butter would make the conventional roux base; a noticeably larger amount may separate out as the dressing chills.
- That tablespoon of saltA full tablespoon of salt for one cup of cream is far outside normal range and almost certainly belongs to the stray recipe fragment. A boiled dressing of this size takes about half a teaspoon.
- "Beaten cream"This most likely means cream whipped before it goes in, though the recipe as printed adds it to the cooked base and then says "Beat well, chill." Whipped cream stirred into a hot pan will deflate, so letting the base cool first is the safer reading.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar in 1907 was less consistently standardized than today's 5 percent cider or white wine vinegar. A quarter cup of modern vinegar is assertive; taste the cooked base before folding in the cream and adjust.
- Mustard and paprikaThe mustard is almost certainly dry powdered mustard rather than prepared. Paprika in American kitchens of the period was generally the mild sweet sort, used as much for color as heat — do not substitute smoked or hot paprika.
- Yield and keepingAbout a cup and a half, enough for a large potato, chicken, or cabbage salad serving six. It thickens considerably as it chills and will keep a few days refrigerated, though the whipped cream will slacken.
Boiled dressing belongs to the long American stretch before bottled mayonnaise, when a cooked, flour-thickened, egg-enriched sauce was the everyday alternative to a hand-beaten oil emulsion. It was cheaper, far more forgiving than mayonnaise, and it was often said to keep better in an era of iceboxes rather than refrigerators — which may be why versions of it appear in so many household cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dressing cabbage, potato, and chicken salads. The cream-enriched version here is the genteel end of the family; plainer households are generally said to have made it with milk and more vinegar. Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored cookbooks of the period it surrounded its promotional confectionery chapters with a full general cookery course, salads included.