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Ripe Olive Dressing
Add to French dressing No. 1 one large onion grated and a dozen ripe olives stoned and chopped fine.
A one-line variation that assumes you have already made the book's base French dressing. The proportions are the only real problem: a whole grated onion will bury a cup of vinaigrette.
- French dressing No. 1The base is presumably the book's plain oil-and-vinegar dressing; period French dressings generally run something like three parts oil to one of vinegar with salt and pepper. The book's own No. 1 is not given here, so its proportions and yield are unknown; the notes below assume roughly a cup of finished dressing.
- Scale the onion downA "large onion" grated into a cup of dressing is overwhelming by current taste, and its juice will make the whole thing sharp and hot within a day. A tablespoon or two of grated onion, or a minced shallot, gives the effect that was intended.
- Ripe olivesIn an American book of this era "ripe olives" usually indicates the canned California black olive, mild and lye-cured, rather than the salty Greek or oil-cured kind. A dozen small canned olives comes to something like a quarter to a third of a cup once chopped; brined black olives will work but push the salt up considerably.
- StonedSimply pitted. Canned olives now come pitted, so the step disappears; press each one flat with the side of a knife before chopping so the pieces stay coarse rather than turning to paste.
- Hold the saltOlives and their brine carry a good deal of salt into the dressing. Mix, taste, and season at the end rather than salting the base as written.
- It will separateThere is no emulsifier here, and the grated onion and olive solids sink. Shake hard immediately before dressing the salad. A little dry mustard whisked into the base helps it hold together for a few minutes.
- Yield and useSomething over a cup, depending on how much base dressing you start with, enough for a large salad. It suits firm lettuce, sliced tomatoes or a head-lettuce wedge, where the chopped olive has something to cling to.
- KeepingRefrigerate and use within two or three days. Raw grated onion turns bitter and sulphurous in oil well before the dressing itself goes off.
The ripe olive was a newly abundant thing for American cooks to lean on. Californian growers developed the lye-curing process for black "ripe" olives in the 1890s and were canning them in quantity in the following decade, which is why American recipe books of the period distinguish between "ripe olives" and the green Spanish sort sold in bottles. The result was a cheap, meaty fruit that turned up chopped into sandwich fillings, croquettes, sauces and, as here, salad dressings. A dressing built on a base and then varied by a single added line is also characteristic of how these books were organised: one master French dressing, then a page of one-sentence descendants.