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Cucumber Dressing
1 cup whipped cream. 1 tablespoon lemon juice. 1 cucumber, chopped fine. 1/4 minced onion. 1/4 teaspoon salt.
Whip cream stiff. Lightly mix in other ingredients.
A cream-based salad dressing of the early 1900s, closer to a sauce than a vinaigrette. Two things decide whether it works: how much water you take out of the cucumber, and how gently you fold.
- Drain the cucumber firstThis is the hinge. Peel, seed and chop the cucumber, toss it with a pinch of salt, let it sit 15-20 minutes in a sieve, then press out the liquid and blot dry. Undrained cucumber weeps and the whipped cream collapses into a puddle within the hour.
- "1/4 minced onion"The original is genuinely ambiguous here — it could mean a quarter of an onion or a quarter teaspoon of onion, and Mrs. Wilson's line gives no unit. A quarter of a raw onion would dominate a cup of cream; err toward a teaspoon or two of very finely minced mild onion, or grate it and use the juice only.
- Cream to use"1 cup whipped cream" is ambiguous: it may mean a cup of cream to be whipped, or a cup of cream already whipped. The direction "Whip cream stiff" suggests the former. Use heavy or whipping cream (roughly 30-36% fat); lighter cream is harder to keep stable once the acid and cucumber go in.
- Whip to soft-stiff, not grainy"Stiff" here means it holds a peak, not that it is beaten to the edge of butter. Overwhipped cream breaks when you fold in the lemon juice.
- Order of foldingAdd the lemon juice first with a few strokes, then the cucumber, onion and salt. Acid loosens whipped cream slightly, so keep the mixing to the minimum the word "lightly" implies.
- Yield and timingYield depends on how the cream measure is read, roughly 1 1/2 to 3 cups. Make it shortly before serving and keep it cold; it will not hold overnight and cannot be re-whipped.
- What to put it onThe recipe gives no serving suggestion; a cream dressing of this kind suits crisp lettuce, sliced tomatoes or cold fish. It is unsweetened despite the whipped cream, so taste for salt before it goes to the table.
Cream dressings like this one belong to a moment when dairy stood alongside oil in the American salad bowl — boiled dressings, sour cream dressings and whipped cream dressings fill the salad chapters of household cookbooks from roughly the 1890s through the 1920s, alongside French dressing and the then-new commercial mayonnaise. Cucumber and cream is an old pairing in English and Northern European cooking, usually as an accompaniment to fish, and the addition of onion and lemon here points the same way. Mrs. Wilson wrote as a newspaper household editor during and just after the First World War, and her books favor exactly this kind of entry: five ingredients, two sentences, no fuss, and an assumption that the cook already knows what a stiff cream looks like.