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Vinaigrette Dressing
1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon paprika 1/2 teaspoon finely chopped parsley 2 tablespoons lemon juice 4 tablespoons olive oil 1 tablespoon finely chopped red pepper Mix the ingredients with a small Dover egg beater.
A plain lemon-and-oil vinaigrette from a wartime-era meatless cookbook, made emulsified rather than shaken. A few notes on the equipment and proportions.
- Dover egg beaterA hand-crank rotary beater, standard equipment in American kitchens from the 1870s onward. A small whisk, a jar with a tight lid, or an immersion blender does the same job; the point is to break the oil into the acid so the dressing thickens briefly rather than separating on the plate.
- The ratioTwo parts oil to one part acid is sharper than the modern default of three or four to one. Taste before dressing anything green, and add oil by the spoonful if it bites.
- Red pepperHere 'finely chopped' and the tablespoon quantity point to a fresh sweet red pepper or a pimiento rather than chile; note that in this period 'red pepper' on its own often meant ground cayenne, so the wording is doing the work, not the term itself.
- PaprikaEarly twentieth-century American paprika was mild and used largely for color. Use sweet Hungarian or a plain sweet paprika, not smoked or hot, unless you want a different dressing.
- Not a classic vinaigretteDespite the name there is no vinegar here. Lemon juice alone gives a rounder, less aggressive acidity; if you substitute wine vinegar, cut it back slightly.
- YieldAbout 7 tablespoons, enough for a salad for four. It will separate within minutes, so mix it just before serving or beat it again at the table.
Vinaigrette sauce reached English-language cookbooks from the French, where vinaigrette was built on vinegar (vinaigre), and the name stuck even when cooks swapped in lemon juice, as here. Meatless cookbooks were widely published in the United States around the First World War, when wheatless and meatless days were promoted as patriotic economy. The rotary egg beater was one of the small mechanical successes of the late nineteenth-century kitchen, and period authors used it for dressings, batters and custards alike.