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Cream Dressing
6 tablespoons heavy cream 2 tablespoons vinegar 1/2 teaspoon salt A few grains of cayenne 3 tablespoons olive oil Beat the cream until stiff, using a small size Dover egg beater. Add the seasoning, oil and vinegar slowly and beat until well blended.
A whipped-cream vinaigrette, closer to a mousse than a pourable dressing. It works if the cream is cold and the acid goes in last and slowly.
- Dover egg beaterA hand-cranked rotary beater, the standard American kitchen tool from the 1870s onward. A balloon whisk or a hand mixer on medium does the same job; the "small size" simply means a beater scaled to a cup or so of cream.
- Cream that will actually whipHeavy cream at 36 percent fat or more. Ultra-pasteurized cream whips but holds less air; avoid anything labeled light or whipping-blend, which will not stiffen. Chill the bowl and beater.
- The hinge: add the acid last and in a threadThe hinge: add the acid slowly -- Vinegar tipped in all at once can break whipped cream and make it weep. The recipe says only to add the seasoning, oil and vinegar slowly; in practice that means beating the cream stiff, adding salt and cayenne, then dribbling in the oil and vinegar a little at a time, beating only enough to blend.
- "A few grains of cayenne"Read as a pinch, no more than a scant 1/8 teaspoon. Err low.
- Vinegar choiceThe recipe does not say which vinegar; white or cider vinegar are the plainest options. Lemon juice can stand in, added just as slowly.
- Yield and servingRoughly 3/4 to 1 cup, enough for a salad for four. Best served soon after making; it is likely to stiffen and separate if held in the refrigerator.
- What to put it onBuilt for sturdy, mild things that hold a thick dressing: shredded cabbage, sliced cucumber, cooked beets, head lettuce wedges, or fruit salads. It slides off delicate leaves in clumps.
Meatless Cookery belongs to the wave of American cookbooks published around the First World War, when Meatless Mondays and Wheatless Wednesdays were promoted as patriotic household economy and the burden of substitution fell on eggs, cheese, cream and legumes. That context explains a dressing this rich: with no meat on the plate, fat and body had to come from somewhere, and whipped cream did the work of both butter and yolk. Cream dressings themselves are older than the war, appearing in nineteenth-century American cookery as a gentler alternative to the boiled or mustard-heavy dressings of the period. The insistence on a Dover beater is a small period marker in itself, naming as equipment what a later cook might simply have assumed.