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Our Favorite Dressing
Yolks of 14 eggs. 1 cup vinegar. 1/2 cup butter. 1/2 cup sugar. 1 teaspoon salt. 1 teaspoon black pepper. Dash cayenne. 1 teaspoon celery seed. 1 teaspoon made mustard and a little onion juice if liked. Put vinegar and butter in double boiler. Beat yolks very, very lightly. Add other things to yolks. When vinegar is hot, add eggs and cook until thick. When cold, add one pint whipped cream. Half of recipe makes enough for small family. This will keep for week in refrigerator. Add whipped cream when ready to serve.
A cooked ("boiled") salad dressing of the old American type, lightened at the last minute with whipped cream. The whole thing turns on gentle heat: the yolks are the only thickener, and direct heat will scramble them.
- Keep it in the double boilerThe base must be cooked over barely simmering water, stirred constantly, until it coats a spoon — around 175-180F. It thickens suddenly near the end; pull it off the heat while it still looks slightly loose, as it sets further on cooling.
- Temper the yolksThe instruction to add eggs to hot vinegar is safest done in reverse: ladle a little of the hot vinegar-butter mixture into the beaten yolks first, then return everything to the pan. The acid helps the yolks tolerate heat, but not if they hit it all at once.
- "Beat yolks very, very lightly"This means just enough to break them up and combine, not to aerate. A whipped yolk foams and cooks unevenly.
- Made mustardPrepared mustard, not dry powder; a smooth mild yellow mustard is the closest match. Onion juice is grated onion pressed through a sieve; a quarter teaspoon is plenty.
- Fourteen yolksThe base alone comes to roughly three cups, and a pint of cream, whipped, more than doubles it. Even the half batch the recipe recommends should dress salad for a large table. Save the whites for meringue or an angel cake.
- Add the cream at the tableWhipped cream folded in early weeps and deflates. Fold it into only as much cooled base as you plan to serve, and keep the rest plain.
- StorageThe unwhipped base is acidic and cooked, and refrigerates well, but current practice is three to four days rather than the week claimed here. Once cream is folded in, use it the same day.
- If it breaksA slightly grainy base can usually be rescued by straining it while warm and beating hard as it cools. Fully scrambled yolks cannot be saved.
Before bottled mayonnaise, American households often dressed their salads with a cooked dressing like this one: vinegar, eggs and sometimes butter or flour, thickened over water and slackened with cream or milk. It suited a kitchen without reliable refrigeration, since the acid and the cooking gave it a keeping quality raw mayonnaise never had, and it matched the sweeter, sharper palate that went with cabbage slaw, potato salad and cold chicken. Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal and built her reputation during the food-conservation years of the First World War, so her books lean toward household economy — though this recipe calls for fourteen yolks and a pint of cream, and the note that half the recipe suffices for a small family reads like an apology for it.