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Cooked Dressing. No. 1
Three eggs, two teaspoonfuls of salt, one teaspoonful of mustard, one teaspoonful of paprika or 1-4 saltspoonful of cayenne, two tablespoonfuls of oil or melted butter, one cupful of milk, one-half cupful of vinegar. Separate the eggs and beat the yolks until light. Add the seasonings to the vinegar and heat it to the boiling point. Scald the milk, pour it on to the beaten yolks and cook it with the vinegar in a double boiler until it begins to thicken, then add the oil and whites of the eggs, which have been beaten until stiff.
A boiled dressing of the old school: an egg custard sharpened with vinegar, standing in for mayonnaise without the labour of emulsifying a cup of oil. The whole thing hinges on gentle, indirect heat.
- The double boiler is not optionalDirect heat will scramble the yolks and split the milk before the mixture thickens. Keep the water below a simmer and stir constantly; the dressing is done when it coats the spoon, around 170F.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the cayenne option is about one-sixteenth of a teaspoon — a trace. The paprika alternative at a full teaspoon is for colour as much as heat.
- Mustard means dry mustardMustard most likely means dry mustard -- In a recipe of this style, a teaspoonful of mustard is more probably powdered mustard than the prepared jarred kind. Dissolving it in the vinegar, as directed, both blooms the flavour and prevents lumps.
- Curdled look is normal at firstHot vinegar meeting scalded milk will flocculate. It smooths out as the yolks thicken, and a brief whisking or a quick blitz with a stick blender at the end will pull it together.
- The egg whitesFolding in stiff whites off the heat gives a light, almost foamy dressing, but they are barely cooked. Add them while the custard is still hot and hold the pan over the water another two or three minutes, stirring, so the whole mixture reaches 160F.
- Vinegar strengthHalf a cup is a lot of acid by modern taste, and modern distilled vinegar at 5 percent may be sharper than some of what was sold in bulk when this was written. Cider vinegar, or a mix of vinegar and water, will soften the effect.
- SaltTwo teaspoons reads high but is spread across roughly a pint of finished dressing. Season toward the end rather than committing all of it up front.
- Yield and keepingAbout two cups, enough for a large potato, cabbage or chicken salad. Cool it quickly, refrigerate in a covered jar, and use within three or four days; it thickens considerably when cold and can be loosened with a spoonful of milk.
Cooked or "boiled" dressings like this one were a common American alternative to mayonnaise long before mayonnaise came out of a jar. Whisking a cup of oil into raw yolks by hand was slow and prone to breaking, and a thickened egg-and-milk custard let vinegar and dry mustard carry the flavour -- note that this version uses two tablespoons of fat where a mayonnaise would use a cup. Dressings of this kind are associated with the turn-of-the-century salad course, when salads increasingly took the form of composed dishes on lettuce leaves, each needing a dressing that could be made ahead and kept in the icebox. Commercial mayonnaise, sold in American groceries from around the 1910s, gradually pushed cooked dressing to the margins, though it survives in the sweet-tart bottled "salad dressing" style and in regional potato and cole slaw recipes.