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Garlic Dressing
Slice and cut a clove of garlic and mash it to a paste. Add a teaspoon of salt, half a teaspoon of cayenne pepper, quarter of a teaspoon of paprika and one tablespoon of tomato catsup. Add five tablespoons of oil gradually and one tablespoon of lemon juice. Beat with a silver fork or Dover egg beater.
A simple oil-and-lemon dressing thickened slightly by mashed garlic and catsup. The proportions are workable as written, with one caveat about heat.
- CayenneHalf a teaspoon of cayenne in a dressing of only about seven tablespoons is aggressive by current standards. Start with an eighth of a teaspoon and taste up.
- Dover egg beaterA hand-cranked rotary beater, the standard kitchen tool from the 1870s onward. A small balloon whisk, a jar shaken hard, or a few seconds with an immersion blender all do the same job.
- Why a silver forkCarbon-steel flatware discoloured and picked up a metallic taste from lemon juice and other acids; silver and later stainless do not. Any modern fork is fine.
- Mashing the garlicAdd the salt to the garlic on the board before mashing. The crystals act as an abrasive and give a smoother paste than a knife alone, which matters here because nothing else in the dressing will disguise a coarse chunk.
- The acid ratioFive parts oil to one part lemon juice is leaner on acid than the three-to-one ratio common in modern vinaigrettes, though the catsup contributes some acidity of its own. Taste before serving and add lemon by the half teaspoon if it reads flat.
- CatsupPeriod tomato catsups were often thinner and sharper with vinegar and spice than modern supermarket ketchup, though sweetened commercial brands existed as well. If your ketchup is very sweet, a spoonful of tomato paste plus a little extra lemon comes closer.
- Yield and holdingAbout seven tablespoons, a scant half cup, enough to dress a salad for four. It is not a stable emulsion, so it will separate quickly; beat or shake again just before it goes on the greens.
Garlic in American cookbooks of the early twentieth century sat under some suspicion, associated with immigrant kitchens and often admitted only in small doses: a number of books of the period instruct the cook merely to rub a cut clove around the bowl and discard it. Putting a whole mashed clove into the dressing, as here, is comparatively bold. The tomato catsup, like the Dover beater, points to an American rather than a French recipe; bottled catsup was a common pantry item and cooks used it as a general-purpose seasoning, much as ketchup still turns up in cocktail and Thousand Island dressings.