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Boiled Dressing
3 tablespoons butter ½ teaspoon paprika 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup milk 1 teaspoon mustard 3 egg yolks 1/4 cup hot vinegar Cream butter; add seasonings and hot milk; pour on to the egg yolks. Cook in double boiler until thick; add vinegar, strain, and serve. 4 cup butter 1 teaspoon salt
An egg-yolk dressing thickened without flour, which makes it richer and more fragile than the boiled dressings that rely on a cooked starch paste. The whole recipe hinges on keeping the custard below a simmer.
- Ignore the trailing lineThe words "4 cup butter 1 teaspoon salt" at the end appear to be stray type carried over from an adjacent recipe on the original page. The ingredient list above them accounts for everything the method calls for.
- Mustard means dry powderA teaspoon of "mustard" in a 1907 American book is ground mustard flour, not prepared mustard from a jar. Whisk it into the creamed butter with the salt and paprika so it disperses before any liquid goes in.
- Temper, do not scramblePouring the hot milk mixture onto the yolks in a thin stream while whisking is the point of the instruction. Dumping it in at once sets the yolks in threads and the strainer will catch most of your thickener.
- The double boiler is not optionalWith three yolks and no flour, this thickens between roughly 160 and 175F. Water in the lower pan should be hot but not boiling; the moment it thickens enough to coat a spoon, take it off the heat.
- Vinegar goes in last, off the heatVinegar goes in last -- Acid stirred into a yolk custard over heat makes curdling more likely, so it is safest added at the very end, once the sauce has thickened. The recipe's specification of hot vinegar keeps it from shocking the sauce; taking the pan off the heat first is a sensible precaution, though the text does not say so.
- Strain while hotOnce cool it stiffens and will not pass through a sieve cleanly. A fine mesh strainer catches any set egg and the mustard grit.
- Yield and keepingSomething over 1 1/2 cups, enough for a salad for six to eight. It thickens considerably as it chills; loosen with a spoonful of milk or cream before dressing greens. Refrigerate and use within two or three days.
- What to put it onToo heavy for delicate lettuce. It belongs on cabbage, cold potato, chicken or fish salads, where the vinegar and mustard have something starchy or rich to cut.
Boiled dressing is often described as the everyday American salad sauce for much of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, and it long outlived the arrival of mayonnaise in home kitchens. The reasons were practical: it used no oil, which was expensive and often rancid in the ordinary pantry, it kept better than an uncooked emulsion, and it was said to be less prone to breaking. Cookbooks of the period frequently seem to give two families of it, one thickened with flour and one, like this, thickened with egg yolks alone in the manner of a savory custard. Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer; like other maker-sponsored volumes of the era it surrounded its promotional confectionery chapters with a complete general cookery course, salads included, so the book could sit on the shelf as a household's only manual.