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Cream Salad Dressing
INGREDIENTS. ¾ a cup of thick cream. ¼ a teaspoonful of salt. 2 tablespoonfuls of vinegar A dash of white pepper and or lemon juice. paprica.
Method. Add the seasonings to the cream and beat with a Dover egg-beater until smooth and light. Add a scant fourth a cup of grated horseradish, for a change. The radish should be freshly grated, and added to the cream after it is beaten.
A whipped-cream dressing rather than an emulsified one: the acid and seasoning go in before beating, and the cream carries them. It takes about two minutes with a whisk or a hand mixer.
- The quantitiesThe ingredient list reads as three-quarters of a cup of thick cream, a quarter teaspoonful of salt, and two tablespoonfuls of vinegar or lemon juice, with white pepper and paprika to taste.
- "Thick cream"In American books of this period thick cream means heavy or double cream, i.e. cream rich enough to whip. Ordinary whipping cream will work; half-and-half or light cream will not thicken and the acid will simply thin it further.
- Acid and creamTwo tablespoonfuls of vinegar in three-quarters of a cup of cream will begin to thicken it on contact. Adding the acid in a thin stream while beating, rather than all at once, reduces the risk of its curdling into grains instead of setting smooth.
- A Dover egg-beaterThe standard hand-cranked rotary beater of the era. A balloon whisk or a hand mixer on medium does the same job; a stand mixer is too large for this volume unless you scale up.
- Beat to soft, not stiffThe dressing should mound softly and still fall from a spoon. Taken to stiff peaks with acid already in it, cream turns granular quickly and can break to butter.
- The horseradish variationA scant quarter cup of freshly grated horseradish, added after beating as the text specifies. Folding rather than beating it in keeps the cream from deflating, and fresh root is far hotter than the jarred prepared kind, which is already cut with vinegar.
- Yield and keepingRoughly a cup to a cup and a half once beaten, enough to dress salad for four to six. Make it close to serving time; whipped cream dressings weep and slacken on standing.
- What to serve it withIt suits crisp lettuce, sliced cucumber, beets, and cold poached fish or chicken. The horseradish version goes naturally with beef.
Cream dressings occupy a distinct branch of the American salad repertoire, separate from both boiled dressing and mayonnaise: no egg, no oil, and no emulsion to break, just cream stiffened by acid and beaten full of air. They were common by the late nineteenth century, by which time the rotary egg-beater, a device generally traced to the 1870s, was in use for whipping small quantities of cream. The Dover pattern named here was among the best known of these beaters. Horseradish beaten into cream as a cold sauce for beef is an older tradition, which the author treats here as an option rather than a separate recipe.