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French Dressing
2 tablespoons vinegar 6 tablespoons olive oil 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon paprika Put the salt and paprika in a bowl; add a little oil and beat well; then gradually add the remainder of the oil, stirring constantly. Last of all stir in the vinegar, drop by drop.
A plain 3:1 vinaigrette built in the old order — seasonings first, oil next, acid last. The method is the whole point, and it works.
- The hinge: acid goes in last, slowlyDissolving the salt and paprika in a little oil and then dribbling in the vinegar drop by drop gives a temporary emulsion that clings to leaves better than a dressing simply stirred together. Vinegar added all at once tends to separate faster.
- YieldHalf a cup, which dresses roughly 8–10 cups of loose greens. Multiply freely; the ratio holds.
- The ratioThree parts oil to one part vinegar is the classic proportion and is still standard. Distilled white vinegar (usually 5%) will read sharper than a wine vinegar; if it bites, cut it back a little or switch.
- Paprika, not pepperHalf a teaspoon of paprika is doing colour and mild sweetness, not heat; paprika turns up often in older American salad dressings. Sweet Hungarian paprika is the closest match; smoked paprika will take over the bowl.
- SaltA full teaspoon in half a cup reads high by modern palates. Start with half and taste on a leaf rather than off a spoon, since dressing tastes saltier alone than it does on greens.
- Vessel and toolsA bowl and a fork or small whisk is all this needs. A screw-top jar shaken hard works too, though the drop-by-drop addition gives a slightly thicker result.
- Holding itIt will break within an hour or so — there is no mustard or egg here to stabilise it. Whisk or shake again just before dressing the salad, and dress at the last moment.
"French dressing" in an American cookbook of this era means exactly what this recipe says: oil, vinegar, salt, a little paprika, beaten together, and it is what American writers are generally said to have been calling French since the nineteenth century, on the reasonable grounds that dressing salads with good oil was a French habit before it was an Anglo-American one. The creamy orange bottled product that later took over the name in the United States, sweetened and thickened with tomato, is a twentieth-century commercial development and has almost nothing to do with this. The recipe's careful drop-by-drop instruction is the technique that, scaled up with egg yolk, produces mayonnaise.