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Indian Salad Sauce
4 egg yolks, hard cooked 3 tablespoons cream 1/2 teaspoon pepper 1 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon brown sugar 3 teaspoons prepared mustard 4 tablespoons salad oil 3 tablespoons vinegar 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce Mash yolks of eggs and cream them with dry ingredients. Add oil gradually, mixing thoroughly, then the vinegar and Worcestershire sauce. Put salad greens in bowl, pour this sauce over them, and toss the greens about till well seasoned with sauce. Serve from bowl.
A hard-yolk dressing of the sort that predates jarred mayonnaise: the cooked yolks do the emulsifying work, so it is forgiving and will not break. It makes roughly two-thirds of a cup, enough for a large bowl of greens serving six.
- Where the cream goesThe line "cream them with dry ingredients" reads most naturally with "cream" as the verb, which leaves the 3 tablespoons of dairy cream unplaced. The simplest resolution is to mash the yolks smooth with the cream first, then work in the salt, pepper, sugar and mustard before the oil goes in.
- Sieve the yolksPushing the hard-cooked yolks through a fine sieve rather than mashing them with a fork is the difference between a smooth sauce and a grainy one. Any lumps left at this stage will still be there at the table.
- Salad oilIn a book of this period this means a bland oil, cottonseed or corn among them. Use a neutral vegetable or light olive oil; a strong extra-virgin will fight the Worcestershire.
- Prepared mustardJarred mustard, not powder. American yellow gives the period flavour; Dijon makes a sharper sauce. Do not substitute dry mustard measure for measure.
- Seasoning is assertiveHalf a teaspoon of pepper and a full teaspoon of salt in a batch this size is deliberately strong, because the sauce is diluted across a whole bowl of greens. Taste before adding more, and hold back if your Worcestershire is a salty brand.
- Add the oil slowlyA thin stream while stirring constantly gives the thickest result. The cooked yolks make this far more forgiving than a raw-yolk mayonnaise, but dumping the oil in at once leaves it thin and greasy.
- Dress at the last minuteToss the greens only as they go to the table; the vinegar wilts tender lettuce quickly. The original has you serve straight from the mixing bowl.
- Keeping itBecause it contains cooked egg and cream, treat it as perishable: refrigerate and use within two days. It will stiffen when cold and needs a brief stir, or a teaspoon of cream, to loosen.
Dressings built on sieved hard-cooked yolks are older than the bottled mayonnaise that displaced them, and they survived into the twentieth century as a reliable option in a kitchen without a mixer. The name here has little to do with the subcontinent's cooking as such: on English and American menus of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries "Indian" often signalled the Anglo-Indian flavour vocabulary of the colonial table, and Lea & Perrins traded on an origin story tying its tamarind-and-anchovy sauce to Bengal, though that account is company lore rather than documented history. The brown sugar and mustard alongside it give a sweet-sharp profile of the kind period cooks associated with spiced dishes, without any curry powder present.