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Butter Salad Dressing
1/4 cup butter 2 tablespoons flour 2 teaspoons salt few grains cayenne 1 cup milk ½ cup vinegar 3 eggs 2 teaspoons mustard Melt butter; add flour, mustard, salt, cayenne and milk. Cook in double boiler five minutes. Pour on to the beaten eggs; add vinegar, and cook in double boiler until mixture thickens. 1½ teaspoons salt teaspoon pepper few grains cayenne French Dressing No. I Rub bowl with onion; mix salt, pepper, cayenne; add paprika, oil and vinegar. Stir with a piece of ice. teaspoon paprika 6 tablespoons oil 3 tablespoons vinegar
A cooked boiled dressing of the old New England type, thickened with both flour and egg. The page has run two recipes together — the ingredient list for French Dressing No. I has been split by the printer, with part of it landing above the second recipe's heading.
- The hinge: temper the eggsThe hot milk mixture goes onto the beaten eggs, not the reverse, and it should be poured in a thin stream while whisking. Dumping eggs into the hot base curdles it immediately.
- Keep it in the double boilerDirect heat will scramble this dressing. Over simmering water it should thicken to coat a spoon in roughly 5 to 10 minutes; if it looks grainy, a quick pass through a sieve or a few seconds of hard whisking usually pulls it back together.
- Vinegar last, for a reasonThe recipe adds the acid only after the eggs have been mixed with the hot base, which reduces the risk of curdling when it goes back over the water. Adding it also thins the mixture, so expect it to loosen before it sets.
- SaltTwo teaspoons of salt in about two cups of dressing reads heavy to a modern palate. Start with one teaspoon and correct at the end.
- MustardTwo teaspoons means dry mustard powder, added with the flour so it hydrates in the milk. Prepared jarred mustard is not a substitute here.
- Vinegar strengthHalf a cup of vinegar is a lot of acid; use plain cider or white wine vinegar at 5 percent. Older household vinegar varied widely in strength, so taste before adding the last of it.
- The French dressing fragmentRead it as 6 tablespoons oil, 3 tablespoons vinegar, 1½ teaspoons salt, a measure of pepper the printer lost, a little paprika and a few grains of cayenne. The pepper quantity is genuinely unrecoverable from this text; a quarter teaspoon is a reasonable reading.
- Stirring with iceThe ice chills the dressing as it is mixed, and a little melt water goes in with it. A jar shaken hard, or a small whisk, does the same job.
- Yield and keepingThe butter dressing makes about 2 cups. Cool it, cover, and refrigerate; it thickens considerably when cold and keeps three or four days. Use it on potato salad, chicken salad or shredded cabbage rather than delicate greens.
Boiled dressings like this one belong to the era before jarred mayonnaise, when a cook who wanted a creamy dressing either beat oil into raw yolks by hand or made a cooked custard base like this — flour for insurance, egg for richness, vinegar and dry mustard for bite. The same formula underlies the sweeter boiled dressings that still turn up in Pennsylvania Dutch and Midwestern cole slaw. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it surrounded its chocolate advertising with a full general household repertoire so the volume would stay on the kitchen shelf. The French dressing that follows, rubbed with onion and stirred with ice, shows the other half of the period's salad thinking: cold, sharp and unthickened, for lettuce rather than for cooked vegetables and meats.