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Vegetable Salads with French Dressing (Stand in ice-water to chill)
stand in ice-water to chill. Wipe dry, and arrange the slices in the salad bowl in the form of a Greek cross. Make a French dressing, in the proportion of three tablespoonfuls of cider vinegar to six tablespoonfuls of oil, half a teaspoonful of salt, and a dash of paprica. Rub the inside of the salad bowl with the cut side of an onion before the salad is disposed in it.
This entry begins mid-sentence — the vegetable being sliced has been lost with the previous page, though cucumber or tomato is the likeliest candidate for a dish arranged in overlapping slices. What survives is a complete, workable French dressing and a method of assembly.
- The dressing ratioThree tablespoons vinegar to six of oil is 1:2, sharper than the 1:3 that is the usual modern default. Cider vinegar reads fruitier to most palates, though its acidity is generally much the same as wine vinegar; if you substitute a wine or sherry vinegar you may find it bites, and can move toward 1:3.
- PapricaAn older spelling of paprika. The recipe gives no indication of type; in American kitchens of this period it would most likely have been the sweet, mild sort, used as much for colour as for heat, rather than smoked Spanish pimenton, which will taste anachronistic here.
- The onion rubRubbing the cut face of an onion around the bowl is the hinge of the whole thing — it perfumes the salad without putting raw onion into it. Do it before anything else goes in, and do not overdo it; two or three passes is plenty.
- Ice-water and dryingThe chilling step firms cell walls and makes slices crisp, but the drying is not optional. Any surface water left on the vegetables will thin the dressing and make it slide off.
- EmulsionWhisk or shake the oil and vinegar with the salt just before serving. This is a broken dressing by design and will separate within a few minutes, so dress at the table.
- A Greek crossFour equal arms radiating from the centre of the bowl, slices overlapped like fallen dominoes. It is a presentation instruction, not a technique, and nothing is lost by simply fanning the slices.
- YieldThree tablespoons vinegar and six of oil make nine tablespoons, a generous half cup. How many that will dress depends on the quantity of vegetables, which the surviving text does not give.
American cookery of this period treated "French dressing" as a fixed formula — oil, vinegar, salt, pepper — rather than a brand or a sweetened orange emulsion, which is a twentieth-century supermarket development. Books of this period, aimed at households newly interested in the salad course as a mark of refinement, seem to have emphasised two points that show up here: the vegetables must be genuinely cold and genuinely dry, and the flavouring must be restrained. The onion-rubbed bowl is a trick generally traced to French practice; it let a cook suggest onion without asserting it. Cider vinegar, rather than wine vinegar, marks the recipe as American — it was the cheap domestic vinegar in most pantries.