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Bon Vivant Dressing
(For asparagus, hearts of lettuce, or tomatoes, etc.) Mash two cold hard-boiled eggs in a plate; add one teaspoonful of salt, one teaspoonful of dry mustard, a pinch of black pepper, and a little paprika. Mix this thoroughly and then add gradually four tablespoonfuls of Pompeian Olive Oil. After this is well mixed, add two tablespoonfuls of vinegar, a little at a time, keeping on stirring the mixture until it acquires a creamy consistency.
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A cooked-egg dressing of the type that preceded blender mayonnaise: the mashed yolk and white do the emulsifying work, so it holds without any raw egg. The whole thing takes five minutes in a bowl with a fork.
- The hinge is the gradual oilAdd the four tablespoonfuls of oil a little at a time, working it into the egg paste before the next addition. Dumped in at once it will not emulsify and you get oily crumbs in vinegar.
- Sieve the eggsMashing on a plate with a fork leaves visible lumps of white. Pushing the eggs through a fine sieve first gives the creamy consistency the recipe asks for.
- Salt and mustardTwo full teaspoons of seasoning for six tablespoons of liquid is aggressive by current taste. Start with half the salt and adjust at the end, especially if serving over tomatoes.
- Dry mustardMustard powder, not prepared mustard. It needs a few minutes in contact with the moist egg to develop its heat, so mix it in before the oil as directed.
- VinegarUnspecified; in an American booklet of this period that would most often have been cider or plain white distilled. Cider vinegar suits asparagus; a wine vinegar is closer to modern expectations for lettuce hearts.
- Brand name"Pompeian Olive Oil" appears to be the sponsor's own product. Any good olive oil works; a mild one is the safer choice.
- Yield and keepingRoughly two-thirds of a cup, enough to dress salad for four. Because it contains cooked egg, refrigerate and use within two days; it will stiffen cold and needs stirring back.
This comes from one of the recipe booklets issued by the Pompeian Olive Oil company of Baltimore, part of a wave of branded pamphlet cookbooks that American food firms distributed free in the early twentieth century to teach a public that still associated olive oil with the medicine cabinet more than the salad bowl. The recipe names the sponsor's product by its full trade name, which is why the instruction reads like advertising copy. The dressing itself belongs to an older family than mayonnaise: boiled and cooked-egg dressings were common in nineteenth-century households, being far more forgiving to make by hand than a raw-yolk mayonnaise, and "bon vivant" may have been no more than a period flourish signalling something richer than plain oil and vinegar.