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Allemande Salad Dressing
1/2 cupful of best butter. 1 tablespoonful of flour. 1/2 cupful of olive oil. 1/2 cupful of vinegar. 1 cupful of strong chicken or veal broth. Salt and white pepper. Little cream to thin and whiten the dressing. Mix the butter and flour together in a saucepan over the fire as if making drawn butter, pour in the oil and then the broth gradually, stirring till it thickens, and then the vinegar, salt and pepper, and lastly the cream. Strain and set on ice till wanted.
The broth should be strong enough to set in jelly when cold, and should be strained through a napkin before it is used for the dressing. Potato Salad a l'Allemande. 2 quarts of potatoes cut in dice. 3 or 4 green onions, with part of the tops. 3 or 4 radishes. 1 head of lettuce cut small. The allemande dressing of the preceding receipt.
Mix all the vegetables and pour the dressing over, or reserve the radishes to ornament the tops of the dishes, or else use cress or parsley for that purpose.
The same dressing will serve for various other vegetable salads as well as the above, and for fish and chicken when there is a mayonaise for border and this for top dressing.
A cooked, broth-based dressing rather than an emulsion of raw egg — closer to a cold velouté than to mayonnaise, and it depends entirely on the gelatin in the stock for body.
- The hinge: gelatinous stock"Strong enough to set in jelly when cold" is what the recipe asks for. Use homemade chicken or veal stock made with feet, wings or knuckle bones and reduced until a spoonful chills to a firm wobble; commercial cartoned broth will not set, and the dressing will be looser and thinner on the ice than intended.
- "As if making drawn butter"Drawn butter in this period means a plain butter-and-flour roux thinned to a sauce. Cook the 1/2 cup butter with 1 tablespoon flour a minute or two without browning — that is a very slack roux for the volume of liquid, which is why the stock's gelatin does most of the thickening.
- Adding the oilHalf a cup of olive oil whisked into a hot roux will loosen it alarmingly before the stock goes in. Add the oil in a thin stream off the heat, whisking, then return to low heat for the broth. Use a mild oil; a modern peppery extra-virgin will dominate.
- Vinegar and curdlingAdd the vinegar off the boil and the cream last, as written. Vinegar strengths of the period varied but were broadly in the range of modern table vinegars, so little adjustment should be needed; pouring cream into a simmering acid sauce will break it.
- Straining through a napkinA clean linen napkin or a double layer of cheesecloth in a sieve. Do this to the stock while it is warm and liquid, and again to the finished dressing to catch flour lumps.
- Serving temperatureChilled hard it will set to a spreadable paste. Take it from the refrigerator twenty minutes ahead and beat in a little more cream or stock until it pours thickly enough to coat.
- YieldAbout two and a half cups of dressing — ample for the 2 quarts of diced potato that follows. It keeps three or four days refrigerated; being stock-based, treat it like a soup rather than a vinaigrette.
- The potato saladTwo quarts of diced potato is roughly 3 lb before peeling. Dress the potatoes while still just warm so they absorb the dressing, then fold in the lettuce and onions cold, immediately before serving, or the greens collapse.
The name points to sauce allemande, the classical French "German sauce" — a velouté finished with egg yolk and lemon — and this dressing borrows its pale, thickened character while dropping the yolks in favor of a strong jellied stock. The pairing with a diced potato salad of onions and radishes nods in the other direction, toward German-American potato salads, at a time when Jessup Whitehead was writing for the trade in the 1880s and 1890s. His books were addressed to hotel and steamer cooks working at scale, which explains the instructions at the end: mayonnaise as a border for looks, this broth-and-oil dressing spooned over the top where more of it is needed. Stock reduced to a natural jelly did the work now handed to gelatin sheets, cornstarch or a stabilized emulsion.