Home › Recipes › French Mustard Dressing
French Mustard Dressing
Take 3 tablespoons of mustard, 1 tablespoon sugar, and 1 egg. Mix to a smooth paste and gradually pour in a cup of vinegar. Let it come to a boil, stirring meanwhile. 3 eggs 1 teaspoon flour 1/2 teaspoon mustard 1/2 teaspoon salt
A boiled mustard dressing of the type that stood in for mayonnaise before refrigeration was common. The printed text carries a stray fragment at the end, so read the working recipe as the first four sentences.
- The orphaned ingredient listThe "3 eggs, 1 teaspoon flour, 1/2 teaspoon mustard, 1/2 teaspoon salt" does not fit the method above and appears to be a fragment stranded from another recipe; how it got there is not recoverable from the page. Ignore it and work from the mustard, sugar, egg and vinegar.
- What "mustard" means hereMost likely dry mustard powder rather than prepared jarred mustard, given that it is mixed to a paste before liquid is added, though the text does not say. If powder, three tablespoons is assertive; it will bloom sharply when the vinegar hits it and then mellow as the mixture cooks.
- VinegarThe recipe does not say which vinegar; cider or wine vinegar is the likely household choice, and strength varied. A cup is 8 fl oz. Distilled white vinegar will taste harsher than the original probably intends.
- The hinge: do not truly boil itThe instruction to "let it come to a boil" will scramble the egg if taken literally. Cook over low heat or a water bath, stirring constantly, until it thickens and just begins to bubble at the edge — around 175-180F — then pull it off at once.
- Smooth paste firstMix mustard, sugar and egg to a paste before any vinegar goes in, and add the vinegar in a thin stream. Dumping it in cold and all at once leaves lumps of dry mustard that no amount of stirring will dissolve later.
- Consistency and yieldRoughly a cup, enough for a salad for several. It thickens further as it cools; if you want it thinner, thin with cream or a little water after cooling rather than with more vinegar.
- StorageBeing cooked and acidic it holds reasonably well, a few days covered in the refrigerator. Strain it while warm if the egg has caught anywhere.
Boiled dressings like this one were a common American salad sauce through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, and they appear widely in household books of the period. The reason is practical: cooking the egg with vinegar produces a sauce that holds for days without ice, where a raw-egg emulsion does not. The "French" in the title has little to do with France; it drifted into a general American label for any sharp, vinegar-forward dressing, and it later attached itself to the sweetened tomato dressing sold under that name today. Dry mustard was the cook's reliable pantry staple, sold in tins and used as much for its thickening and emulsifying help as for its heat in so many dressings, cheese sauces and rarebits from these books.