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Boiled Salad Dressing
tablespoon mustard 11 cups milk 1/4 cup vinegar Beat eggs slightly; add gradually oil, salt and mustard; when smooth, add vinegar, then milk. Cook in double boiler, stirring constantly until mixture thickens.
A cooked, custard-style dressing of the kind that preceded mayonnaise in most American households. The printed text here has lost several quantities to worn type, so read it as a method rather than a formula.
- The missing amountsThe ingredient list as printed gives only "tablespoon mustard," "11 cups milk" and "* cup vinegar," with the eggs, oil and salt quantities dropped entirely. "11 cups" is likely a broken fraction, though which fraction cannot be recovered from this page. Boiled dressings of this type commonly run to something like a cup of milk to a quarter cup of vinegar, with a couple of eggs, a spoonful of oil or melted butter and a little salt — but treat any reconstruction as your own.
- Mustard means dry mustardMustard probably means dry mustard -- A tablespoon of prepared mustard would be mild; in dressings of this kind "mustard" usually means dry mustard powder, and a tablespoon of that is assertive. Rub it smooth with the salt before the liquids go in or it may stay in lumps.
- Order mattersVinegar first, milk second, as written. Vinegar poured straight into milk will curdle it visibly; taking the acid into the egg-and-oil base first at least dilutes it before the milk goes in.
- The hinge: constant stirring, gentle heatThis is a stirred custard with acid in it, which makes it quicker to scramble than a plain one. Keep the water below a boil, do not let the bowl touch the water, and stir without pause. It thickens to the consistency of pouring cream at around 170-180F and is done the moment it coats a spoon.
- If it breaksGrainy dressing can usually be rescued by pulling it off the heat immediately and beating hard, or by pushing it through a fine sieve while warm. It will not come back if it has actually scrambled.
- It thickens as it coolsBoiled dressing is thin off the stove and spoonable cold. Chill it fully before judging the texture, and thin with a little milk if it sets too stiff.
- Yield and keepingKeeping -- Refrigerate in a covered jar and use within three or four days.
Boiled dressing was the workaday American salad sauce long before jarred mayonnaise, and it survived alongside it well into the twentieth century. It exists because mayonnaise is an emulsion that demands good oil, a steady hand and a cool kitchen, while a cooked dressing gets its body from egg protein and needs only a spoonful of fat — a real consideration in households where salad oil was an expensive imported item and butter was on hand. Its sharpness suited the salads it dressed: cabbage, cold potato, chopped chicken, and the moulded and mayonnaise-bound compositions that filled salad chapters in books of this era. Lowney's, published by the Massachusetts chocolate firm to promote its own products, still carried a full general cookbook around its chocolate recipes, and a basic dressing like this one was standard equipment in any such volume.