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Cream Dressing
3 egg yolks hard cooked 1 teaspoon salt teaspoon cayenne 1 teaspoon mustard 2 tablespoons vinegar 1½ cups thick cream Mash the yolks; add salt, vinegar and mustard. Beat the cream until stiff; add the beaten cream, little at a time, to the egg mixture; when stiff, add cayenne.
A whipped-cream salad dressing of the kind that filled American cookbooks before bottled mayonnaise. The method is fragile rather than difficult: the acid and seasoning go into the yolks first, and the cream is folded in afterwards.
- Missing fractionsThe measurements have come through with their fractions stripped in places. Read this as roughly 1 teaspoon salt, a scant 1/8 teaspoon cayenne, and 1 teaspoon dry mustard for 1 1/2 cups cream; taste and adjust rather than trusting the figures as printed.
- Mustard means powder"Mustard" in a dressing of this period is most likely dry mustard powder rather than a prepared jarred mustard. Prepared mustard would add its own vinegar and salt and thin the base.
- Thick creamPeriod "thick cream" corresponds broadly to what is now sold as heavy or whipping cream, around 36 percent butterfat. Anything lighter will not hold the stiff peak the recipe depends on, and ultra-pasteurized cream whips slower and slumps sooner.
- Sieve, do not mashPress the hard-cooked yolks through a fine sieve instead of mashing with a fork. Lumps of yolk will not disperse once the cream is in, and beating harder to break them will knock the air out.
- The hinge: acid before creamThe recipe puts the vinegar into the yolk paste rather than onto the whipped cream, which is the safer order: acid can slacken whipped cream, and this dressing has no oil or cooked starch to fall back on.
- Fold, in stages"Add the beaten cream, little at a time" means fold in a third to loosen the yolk paste, then the rest gently. The finished dressing should mound on a spoon.
- Serve at onceWhipped-cream dressings tend to weep after an hour or two, and re-beating rarely restores them. Make it just before the salad goes to the table and keep it cold until then.
- Yield and useYield depends on how much air the cream takes; 1 1/2 cups of cream roughly doubles when whipped, so expect appreciably more than two cups. It suits fruit salads, cold chicken, and shredded cabbage far better than a delicate leaf salad, which it will flatten.
Lowney's Cook Book was issued in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and compiled by Maria Willett Howard; like many manufacturers' cookbooks it ranged well beyond the sponsor's product into a full domestic repertoire. Cream dressings of this type belong to the era before commercial mayonnaise reached American shelves, when a cook wanting a rich salad sauce either emulsified oil by hand, boiled a cooked dressing thickened with egg and flour, or took this shortcut: hard-cooked yolks for body, vinegar and mustard for bite, and whipped cream in place of the oil. The result is lighter than mayonnaise, which may be why such dressings turn up in the period alongside fruit, chicken, and cabbage salads rather than green ones. Dry mustard and cayenne were a common pair in dressings of this generation of cookbooks, and here the cayenne goes in last.