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Pompeian French Dressing
Put into a shallow bowl one half teaspoonful of salt, half cup of Pompeian Olive Oil. Then add very slowly (stirring constantly) a tablespoonful of vinegar or lemon juice. Mix just before serving.
An eighth teaspoonful of paprika may be added if that flavor is desired, or a dash of Worcestershire Sauce adds a piquant flavor.
A slight and almost indiscernable flavor may be added by rubbing the bowl, before the dressing is mixed, with a piece of cut onion or a more decided taste by the addition of a few drops of onion juice.
Another way to mix the ingredients is to put them in a cruet (half filled) and shake until they mix.
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A branded advertising vinaigrette from an olive oil pamphlet, and a useful record of what "French dressing" meant before bottled versions took the name. Two things need attention: the ratio and the fact that this will separate almost immediately.
- The ratio is very oil-heavyHalf a cup of oil to one tablespoon of acid is roughly 8:1. Modern practice is usually 3:1 or 4:1, so this will taste markedly less sharp than a present-day vinaigrette. Taste as you add and stop when it tastes balanced rather than following the volumes.
- Dissolve the salt in the acid, not the oilAs written the salt goes into oil, where it will not dissolve and will sit gritty at the bottom. Stirring the salt into the vinegar or lemon juice first, then adding the oil, gives a cleaner-tasting dressing with no change to the ingredients.
- "Mix just before serving" is the hingeThere is no emulsifier here at all: no mustard, no egg, no honey. Oil and vinegar will part within a minute or two. Dress the salad the moment the dressing is mixed, or re-shake immediately before it goes on.
- The cruet methodA cruet is a small stoppered glass bottle from a table caster set. Any screw-top jar works, and shaking gives a more thorough temporary emulsion than the stirring method does.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and use the liquid that collects, or press grated onion in a fine sieve. A few drops is genuinely a few drops; it is assertive.
- PaprikaIn this period American paprika generally meant a sweet Hungarian-style powder, used in large part for colour. Smoked paprika, which was not widely available in American shops until much later in the century, would dominate the dressing.
- YieldAbout a generous half cup (roughly nine tablespoons), enough to dress a salad for several people. It does not keep well, since there is nothing in it to hold the emulsion or the fresh flavour of the oil.
This appears to come from a promotional recipe booklet issued by an olive oil company -- the text names the brand throughout -- a common form of American cookery print in the earlier twentieth century, when brands distributed small pamphlets to teach cooks what to do with an unfamiliar product. Olive oil was in this period still often a specialty item for American cooks, bought from immigrant grocers or pharmacies rather than kept as a pantry staple, and booklets like this one worked to normalise it. "French dressing" at the time generally meant something close to this: oil, acid, salt, mixed and used at once, in contrast to the cooked or egg-thickened boiled dressings also common in American salad cookery. The name later drifted, and by mid-century a bottled, sweetened, tomato-tinted product had largely taken it over in the United States. The stray characters at the end of the text are most likely mis-transcribed printer's ornaments from the original page.