Home › Salad Dressings › French Dressing No. 1
French Dressing No. 1
Put four tablespoons of olive oil in a bowl with one tablespoon of white wine vinegar, half a teaspoon of salt and a saltspoon of paprika. Mix with a small size Dover egg beater.
A plain vinaigrette at a 4:1 ratio, and the only real technique is the beating. A few terms need translating.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is the smallest spoon in an old measuring set, roughly a quarter teaspoon. Paprika here is for colour and a faint sweetness, not heat.
- Dover egg beaterDover was a well-known brand of hand-cranked rotary beater in this period, familiar enough that a cookbook could name it and a size without explaining either. A small whisk, a fork worked hard, or a jar with a tight lid does the same job; the point is to break the oil into fine droplets.
- Dissolve the salt firstThe recipe puts oil, vinegar, salt and paprika into the bowl together, but salt goes into solution in vinegar rather than oil, so you may prefer to stir the salt and paprika into the vinegar until the grains are gone before beating in the oil.
- It will separateThere is no mustard, egg or other emulsifier here, so the mixture holds for a few minutes at most. Beat again immediately before it goes on the salad.
- Olive oilThe oil intended here was probably milder than a modern extra-virgin. A grassy, bitter one will dominate at this proportion; choose something gentle or expect a much more assertive dressing.
- YieldFive tablespoons, enough to dress a salad for three or four. Scale up freely, keeping the four-to-one proportion.
"French dressing" in American cookbooks of this era meant exactly what is written here: oil, vinegar, salt, pepper or paprika, beaten together, the plain vinaigrette that English and American writers had long attributed to French practice. The bottled orange, sweetened, tomato-tinged product that later took the name is a separate and much later development. The Dover beater named in the instruction was a familiar brand of geared rotary egg beater, common enough in household kitchens that a cookbook could specify a size without further explanation.