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Horse-radish Cream Dressing
4 tablespoons grated horse-radish 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons vinegar 1 teaspoon paprika few grains cayenne 4 cup cream Beat cream until stiff; add remaining ingredients and Horse-radish Cream Dressing No. 2 serve. 1/4 cup grated horse-radish 2 tablespoons lemon juice 2 tablespoons vinegar 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce Beat cream until stiff. Add remaining ingredients, and serve.
A whipped-cream dressing of the kind that once dressed cold beef, tongue and beet salads. It is assembled in a minute, but it does not hold, so make it last.
- The creamUse heavy or whipping cream with at least 35 percent fat; light cream and half-and-half will not take air. Whip to soft-to-firm peaks, not to the point where the fat begins to separate.
- Fold, do not beatThe recipe says only "add remaining ingredients"; folding them in with a spatula is the safer reading, since vinegar and lemon juice stirred in briskly will deflate the cream.
- QuantitiesThe cream measure in the first version and the horseradish measure in the second have both lost their fractions in this printing, and the second version's cream is missing from its ingredient list altogether. The original amounts cannot be recovered; a cup of cream to four tablespoons of horseradish is one workable ratio, not the recipe's own.
- HorseradishFreshly grated root is what is meant. Bottled prepared horseradish is packed in vinegar, so drain it well and cut back the vinegar in the recipe accordingly.
- Paprika and cayenneThe book does not say which paprika; a mild, sweet one suits the dish, used as much for colour as heat. "Few grains" of cayenne means a pinch.
- TimingAcid and salt draw liquid out of whipped cream fairly quickly, so whip and fold shortly before the salad goes to the table; refrigerate the bowl and beaters beforehand if the kitchen is warm.
- YieldA cup of cream whips to roughly two cups of dressing; because the recipe's cream measure is illegible here, any serving count is an estimate -- six to eight alongside cold meat or a beet salad if a cup is used.
Horseradish and cream is a long-standing partnership in the European kitchen: the grated root's heat comes from volatile mustard oils released when the cells are broken, and fat blunts them, which is why cream and butter are often said to be its traditional carriers. Lowney's book belongs to the era when whipped cream was treated as a salad dressing in its own right rather than a dessert garnish, a fashion that ran through American cookbooks from the 1890s into the 1920s alongside the boiled and mayonnaise dressings that filled the same chapters. The second version, with Worcestershire and lemon among its seasonings, points toward the cold roast beef and tongue that such a dressing might have accompanied.