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Salad Dressing (Tsp mustard tsp salt tsp flour)
1 tsp. mustard, 1 tsp. salt, 1 tsp. flour, 4 tsp. sugar, 1 egg, 1 cup vinegar, 1 cup milk, butter size of a walnut. Mix mustard, flour, sugar, salt, egg and milk. Boil the vinegar and pour over mixture. Add butter and cook until it thickens.
— Mrs. Harry T. Bryant
A boiled dressing of the type that preceded mayonnaise in most American kitchens: cooked custard-style over heat, so it keeps for a week or two and costs a fraction of an oil-based dressing. The instructions assume you already know how to handle an egg over heat.
- Cook it gently, and stirThe hinge is temperature. There is one egg holding a pint of liquid together, so it must thicken below a simmer over low heat or in a double boiler, stirred constantly. Direct high heat will curdle it into grainy specks that no amount of whisking recovers.
- Pour the hot vinegar slowlyBoiling vinegar hitting a cold egg-and-milk mixture in one go will scramble the egg. Add it in a thin stream while whisking, then return the whole thing to the pan to thicken.
- "Mustard" means dry powderIn a community cookbook of this kind this is most likely ground mustard flour, not prepared mustard from a jar. Prepared mustard would add its own vinegar and sugar and throw the balance off.
- Butter size of a walnutAbout 1 tablespoon, roughly half an ounce. Shelled walnut, not the whole nut in its shell.
- Milk and vinegar will look wrongA cup of hot vinegar added to a cup of milk curdles the milk on contact. This is expected in boiled dressings; the flour and egg bring it back to a smooth sauce as it thickens. Whole milk holds together better than skim.
- Expect it sharpEqual vinegar and milk with only 4 teaspoons of sugar gives a dressing more acidic than modern palates expect. It suits cabbage, potato and hearty greens better than delicate lettuce. Cider vinegar may be closer to what the writer would have had than distilled white, though the recipe does not specify.
- Yield and keepingA little over two cups, enough for a large bowl of slaw. It thickens considerably as it chills; thin it with a spoonful of milk before serving. Refrigerate and use within about a week.
Boiled dressings like this one dominated American home cooking from the mid-nineteenth century until bottled mayonnaise became cheap and widespread in the 1920s and 30s. They exist because they solve a household problem: salad oil was expensive and went rancid, while flour, vinegar, milk and a single egg were always to hand, and cooking the mixture gave it keeping qualities that a raw emulsion lacked. Philathea cook books were compiled by Philathea classes and sold to raise funds; the Baraca-Philathea movement began in Baptist Sunday schools in the 1890s as classes for young women and later became interdenominational. The recipes come in under members' married names, as here, which is why the book reads as a roster of a congregation as much as a set of instructions.