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Roquefort Dressing
Put four tablespoonfuls of Roquefort cheese in small bowl or soup plate and with fork mash until smooth. Mix one half teaspoonful dry mustard, salt and pepper or paprika to taste, and one tablespoonful of vinegar or lemon juice together until smooth and add to the cheese, and then one-fourth cup of Pompeian Olive Oil, stirring slowly all the time.
When smooth and thick, add one teaspoonful of Worcestershire sauce.
To make salads tastier and more healthful, use imported Pompeian Olive Oil.
A straightforward emulsified cheese dressing from an olive oil company's promotional booklet. The proportions are sound; the only real skill is adding the oil slowly enough that it stays thick.
- Quantities in modern termsFour tablespoonfuls of Roquefort is about 2 oz of crumbled cheese; one-fourth cup of oil is 60 ml. The finished dressing makes roughly 2/3 cup, enough for a salad for four.
- Order of operations is the hingeThe vinegar, mustard and seasoning go in before the oil. Salt and mustard dissolve in the acid and the mustard acts as the emulsifier; add the oil first and you get a greasy paste that separates.
- Add the oil in a thread"Stirring slowly all the time" means the oil goes in a thin stream while you work the fork continuously. A small whisk or a jar shaken hard will do the same job in less time.
- The cheeseGenuine Roquefort is a raw sheep's-milk blue and is quite salty; taste before adding salt at all. Any firm blue will substitute, though a Gorgonzola dolce is too soft to mash to the same texture.
- Olive oilThe repeated brand mention is advertising, not technique. Use a mild extra-virgin; a strongly bitter or peppery oil fights the blue cheese and the Worcestershire.
- Vinegar or lemonOne tablespoon to a quarter cup of oil is a 1:4 acid-to-oil ratio, slightly milder than the 1:3 of a standard modern vinaigrette. Red wine vinegar suits Roquefort better than white; lemon gives a lighter result.
- Consistency and keepingIt should be thick enough to cling to a spoon. Refrigerated, it keeps about a week and will firm up considerably; let it stand at room temperature and stir before dressing greens.
This comes from a booklet issued by an olive oil importer, one of many branded recipe pamphlets American food companies distributed in the early twentieth century to teach cooks a use for a product and attach a name to it. Olive oil needed the push: it was often sold through pharmacies as well as grocers, and was best known to Italian and Greek households, and salad dressings were an obvious wedge for moving it onto the general grocery shelf. Roquefort itself was an established luxury import, protected in France by law from 1925 and long before that by the caves of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon where the cheese is ripened; pairing it with olive oil in a printed recipe put two imported goods to work selling one another. The Worcestershire sauce is a period signature, turning up frequently in American savoury recipes of these decades as a general-purpose depth-giver.