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French Dressing
One saltspoonful of salt, one-half saltspoonful pepper, three to five tablespoonfuls of oil, one tablespoonful of vinegar, one-fourth teaspoonful onion juice if liked.
Put the salt and pepper in a bowl, dissolve them with the vinegar, add the oil slowly and mix well. This dressing is suitable for egg or vegetable salads, and is also used to macerate meat or fish salad.
Lemon juice may be used instead of vinegar, and the onion juice if liked.
A plain vinaigrette, and the proportions are still the ones worth knowing. Two details need translating: the saltspoon, and the instruction to dissolve before the oil goes in.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so this is 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon pepper, seasoning the 1/4 to 3/8 cup of dressing the quantities yield.
- The hinge: dissolve firstSalt will not dissolve in oil. Whisking it into the vinegar before any oil goes in is what keeps the dressing from tasting gritty and unevenly salted, and is very likely why the steps are in this order.
- The ratioThree to five tablespoons oil to one of vinegar spans 3:1 to 5:1. Modern practice defaults to 3:1; go to 4:1 or 5:1 if the vinegar is sharp or the salad is delicate.
- Which oil'Oil' in a salad context in a book of this period means olive oil. A fruity extra-virgin will taste considerably more assertive than the original intended; a light olive oil or a neutral oil cut with olive is closer.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine rasp and press the pulp through a sieve, or halve one and scrape the cut face with a spoon. A quarter teaspoon is a whisper of onion, not a flavour in its own right.
- It will separateHand-whisked oil and vinegar with no mustard or egg holds for a few minutes at most. Mix it in the serving bowl and dress at the table, or re-whisk immediately before pouring.
- "Macerate"Here it means to marinate the cooked meat or fish in the dressing for an hour or so before assembling the salad, so the pieces are seasoned through rather than merely coated. Keep it refrigerated while it sits.
- YieldAbout 1/4 to 3/8 cup, enough for roughly four to six cups of leaves or about a pound of cooked meat or fish.
French dressing meant precisely this in nineteenth-century English and American cookery: oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, mixed at the table and used at once. The bottled orange, sweetened, tomato-tinged product that took the name in twentieth-century America is a later and entirely separate thing, and readers coming to old cookbooks expecting it are routinely surprised. The "French" label is generally traced to a period assumption that the plain oil-and-vinegar treatment of greens was a Continental habit, in contrast to the boiled or cooked dressings thickened with egg and cream that were then more common on American tables. Books of this kind tended to print the French dressing first and build variations on it.