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French Dressing No. 2
Put one teaspoon of salt in a bowl with one saltspoon of paprika and black pepper, add four tablespoons of oil and mix well, beating with a silver fork. Then add slowly one tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar, and the dressing will become white and thicker. The ingredients should be so well proportioned and blended that no one ingredient can be distinguished.
A plain vinaigrette in the older 4:1 proportion, whisked by hand until it clouds. Two details need translating: the saltspoon, and the reason for the silver fork.
- A saltspoonRoughly a quarter teaspoon — the little spoon that sat in the open salt cellar. The recipe's "one saltspoon of paprika and black pepper" can be read either as a saltspoon of each or a saltspoon of the two together, against a full teaspoon of salt; start with the smaller amount.
- The salt goes in firstSalt dissolves in the acid and the residual moisture, not in oil. Mixing it with the seasonings and oil before the lemon juice is the older habit; if you want it fully dissolved, put the salt in the lemon juice or vinegar first and add that to the oil.
- The silver forkSilver is often specified in period recipes; the usual explanation is that it does not taint acid food the way older iron and tin could, though table convention plays a part too. Any nonreactive whisk or fork does the same job; avoid unlined copper or bare cast iron.
- Why it turns whiteAdding the acid slowly while beating breaks it into droplets suspended in the oil — a temporary emulsion. That is the whole point of the instruction, and it will separate again within minutes. Beat or shake it once more just before it goes on the greens.
- The ratioFour parts oil to one part acid is sharper-tolerant than the 3:1 most modern recipes use, and it suits a strong red wine vinegar or a stout lemon. With a mild rice vinegar you may want to go closer to 3:1.
- OilThe recipe does not say which oil; in books of this kind it usually means olive or a bland "salad" oil. Anything neutral works, but a very grassy modern extra-virgin will dominate, which is exactly what the last sentence warns against.
- YieldAbout a third of a cup — enough to dress a salad for four generously, six lightly.
French dressing generally meant something close to this through most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: oil, acid, salt, pepper, beaten together and used at once, though the term was applied variously in period sources. The bottled orange-red sweet dressing that later took the name in the United States is a separate, industrial invention and has nothing to do with the entry above. That the book gives a No. 2 at all suggests the dressing was thought of as a foundation to be varied rather than a fixed formula. The closing line, that no single ingredient should be distinguishable, is the standard nineteenth-century test of a dressing and a fair one still.