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Bacon Salad
Cut six or eight slices of tender bacon into small squares and fry until they are delicately browned; then drain on soft paper. Heat six tablespoonfuls of the fat and two tablespoonfuls of vinegar or lemon juice; beat together the yolks of three eggs and one-fourth a teaspoonful, each, of paprica and mustard, and cook with the fat and vinegar over hot water until the mixture thickens slightly.
When the dressing is cold cut a head of lettuce into narrow ribbons, toss the lettuce and bits of bacon together, and mix with the dressing. Serve at once.
A cooked bacon-fat dressing in the German style, thickened with egg yolks rather than mounted as a vinaigrette. The hinge is the custard: it must thicken over water that is hot but not boiling, or the yolks curdle into scrambled egg suspended in grease.
- The double boiler"over hot water" means a bowl or upper pan set over simmering — not boiling — water, the base not touching the liquid. Stir constantly and pull the dressing as soon as it coats a spoon. Let it get much hotter and the yolks are apt to break, and whisking will not bring them back.
- Bacon fat quantitySix tablespoons is a generous amount of rendered fat, and six to eight slices of modern bacon may not yield it. Supplement from a jar of saved drippings rather than reducing the vinegar to compensate, or the dressing will be thin and sharp.
- PapricaSimply the older spelling of paprika. At this period it would have meant a sweet paprika used for colour and mild warmth; smoked or hot varieties, which the recipe cannot have intended, will dominate here.
- MustardDry mustard powder, measured with the paprika. Prepared jarred mustard adds liquid and vinegar of its own and will throw the balance off.
- Vinegar strengthTwo tablespoons against six of fat reads mild by current standards, and vinegar strength was not standardised in this period, so the original acidity cannot be reconstructed from the proportions. Taste the finished dressing cold and add a few drops more if it tastes flat.
- Cooling the dressingThe instruction to cool it fully is deliberate — warm dressing collapses the lettuce ribbons instantly. Cool it over ice if you are in a hurry; it will thicken further as it chills and may need loosening with a spoonful of water.
- The lettuceA head of lettuce cut into narrow ribbons is a chiffonade, and crisphead or romaine holds up better than loose-leaf. Dry the leaves thoroughly; water on the lettuce will thin the dressing and make the bacon soggy.
- YieldEnough dressing for one large head of lettuce. The recipe gives no yield, but it would serve roughly four as a first course. Dress and toss at the table — the salad does not hold for more than a few minutes.
Bacon salads of this kind belong with the German and Pennsylvania Dutch Specksalat, in which hot bacon fat and vinegar are poured over greens to wilt them; the practice travelled with German immigration through the nineteenth century and turns up in American cookbooks under names like "wilted lettuce" and "hot slaw." What is distinctive here is the egg thickening, which turns a poured hot dressing into a cooked, cooled emulsion closer to a boiled dressing — a turn-of-the-century move, at a moment when domestic-science writers were teaching cooks to make dressings that held together and could be prepared in advance.