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1. Mix the seasonings. 2 T. lemon juice or vinegar 4 to 6 T. olive oil 2. Add the olive oil and mix well. 3. Add the acid, a few drops at a time and beat well until the dressing thickens slightly.
Note.-French dressing may he varied by rubbing the bowl with a clove of garlic or a slice of onion or by the addition of celery salt, horse-radish, mustard, Worcestershire sauce, tomato catsup, etc. Boiled Dressing. 1 C. weak vinegar 1 t. mustard t. salt t. pepper 2 T. flour 1. Mix dry ingredients. 2. Add eggs and beat well. 1/2 C. sugar Few grains cayenne 4 T. butter or olive oil 2 eggs 1 C. cream or milk 3. Heat vinegar to the boiling point and pour slowly over the above mixture while stirring. 4. Cook over hot water, stirring constantly until thickened. 5. Add olive oil or butter. 6. Thin with sweet or sour cream.
SALADS Cream Dressing. t. salt Few grains cayenne 1 t. mustard 1 t. sugar T. flour 1. Mix dry ingredients. 2. Add egg and beat well.
Three dressings run together here, and the page has been damaged in transcription: most of the fractions have dropped out, and the Cream Dressing breaks off after step 2. Treat the French and boiled dressings as workable and the third as a fragment.
- The abbreviationsT. is a tablespoon, t. a teaspoon, C. a cup. Where a quantity reads simply "t. salt" or "T. flour" a fraction has been lost from the original page — assume something in the range of a quarter to a half and season by taste rather than guessing at the printed figure.
- French dressing proportionsTwo tablespoons acid to four to six of oil is a 1:2 to 1:3 ratio, at or beyond the sharp end of the 1:3 to 1:4 commonly given today. Start at six tablespoons oil and pull it back if you want the older bite.
- The order of mixingAs printed, the seasonings and oil go together first and the acid is dribbled in last while beating. That is the reverse of standard practice and it works, but salt dissolves poorly in oil; dissolve the salt in the lemon juice or vinegar first if you want it evenly distributed.
- "Weak vinegar"Household vinegar in this period varied widely in strength. Modern distilled vinegar is usually about 5 percent acetic acid, probably stronger than what is meant here — cut a cup of it with two to four tablespoons of water, or use cider vinegar and taste.
- The hinge: cook the boiled dressing gentlyStep 4 says over hot water, and it means it. This is an egg custard with vinegar in it; held over direct heat or taken past a simmer it will curdle and go grainy. Cook in a bowl set over barely simmering water, stirring, until it coats the spoon — around 170 to 180F — then pull it off the heat.
- Butter or oil at the endThe fat goes in at step 5, after the mixture has thickened; the recipe does not say whether the pan is off the heat. Whisk it in a little at a time.
- SugarHalf a cup in the boiled dressing is a lot by current taste; it belongs to an era when boiled dressing was used on cabbage, potato and fruit salads where the sweetness was the point. A quarter cup gives something closer to modern coleslaw dressing.
- Yield and keepingThe French dressing makes roughly half a cup, enough for a salad for four; it will separate on standing and needs re-shaking. The boiled dressing makes appreciably more than two cups, thickens further as it chills, and being egg-based should be refrigerated and used up within a few days.
- The Cream Dressing fragmentThe ingredient list is incomplete and the method stops at the second step. Do not try to reconstruct it from the boiled dressing above; use a current recipe if you want that one.
Manuals of household arts like this one are generally associated with school and normal-school classrooms in the early twentieth century, and the layout is suggestive: a master formula, a numbered procedure, and a note listing permitted variations so a teacher could set a whole class going on French dressing and have each bench produce something different. The pairing of French dressing with a boiled dressing is characteristic of the period. Cooked or boiled dressing, flour-thickened, sweetened, sharpened with vinegar and enriched with egg and cream, was the older American form, cheaper than one built on imported olive oil, and it survives today in commercial coleslaw dressings and in the sweet-sour dressings of Pennsylvania Dutch and Midwestern cooking. Uncooked oil-and-acid dressing was the newer arrival in ordinary kitchens, and the recipe calls for the bowl to be rubbed with garlic or an onion slice rather than for either to be chopped into the dressing, a standard technique of the day.