French
Dressing No. 2 teaspoon mustard few grains cayenne 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon paprika 1/2 teaspoon finely minced onion 6 tablespoons oil 2 tablespoons vinegar Mix onion, salt, mustard, paprika and cayenne. Mash until of a creamy consistency; add oil and vinegar alternately, beating all the time. French Dressing No. 3 1 teaspoon mustard 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon paprika few grains cayenne 3 tablespoons lemon juice 6 tablespoons oil Mix the dry ingredients; add lemon juice and oil alternately, and beat until quite thick.
Two versions of a basic French dressing, one sharpened with onion and vinegar, the other with lemon juice alone. Both are hand-beaten temporary emulsions rather than the stable bottled dressing of today.
- Missing fractionsThe original printing has dropped its fraction marks: "teaspoon mustard" and "+ teaspoon paprika" almost certainly read 1/2 or 1/4 teaspoon. Treat the seasonings as quarter- to half-teaspoon quantities and adjust by taste rather than guessing at the typography.
- The ratio is the recipeNo. 2 runs three parts oil to one part vinegar, the familiar proportion; No. 3 is sharper at two parts oil to one part lemon juice. Everything else is seasoning.
- Mash the seasonings firstNo. 2 has you mash the onion with the salt, mustard and paprika to a creamy consistency before anything else goes in; No. 3 only says to mix the dry ingredients. The mashing helps the salt and mustard disperse rather than stay gritty.
- Alternating the oil and acidAdding oil and vinegar in alternating small amounts while beating gives a briefly stable emulsion. It will still separate within minutes, so beat or shake again just before dressing the greens.
- Mustard means dry mustardIt is listed among the dry ingredients and mixed with them, so powdered mustard rather than prepared mustard from a jar. It also acts as a mild emulsifier.
- OilOlive oil is the likely intention, though 'salad oil' of the period could also mean other refined oils. A mild oil suits the lemon version, where there is nothing to cover bitterness.
- PaprikaPaprika here is for colour and sweetness rather than heat; the cayenne supplies the heat. A sweet, unsmoked paprika is the sensible choice.
- YieldEach dressing makes roughly half a cup. Neither keeps well with raw onion in it; use No. 2 the day it is made.
"French dressing" in American cookbooks of this era meant exactly what these recipes describe: oil, acid, salt and pepper beaten together, the sauce vinaigrette of French practice, taken up in the United States as the correct dressing for plain green salads. Lowney's, a chocolate company's cookbook, includes a run of numbered variations. The name drifted badly over the following decades, and by mid-century "French dressing" on a supermarket shelf usually meant a sweetened, tomato-tinted emulsion with no relation to these. The paprika in the older versions, giving a faint blush of color, is often said to be the ancestor of that later orange bottle, though the connection is traditional rather than documented.