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Salad Cream, or Thin Mayonaise

Reduce the thick mayonaise to the consistency of cream by adding more vinegar or vinegar and water--in some cases milk or cream--and if you wish to be particular use some clear strained chicken broth (cold) or unseasoned soup stock with the vinegar, instead of water. For lobster and other shell fish, however, all vinegar may be used, as they take away its sharpness. This salad cream used as a sauce makes almost any kind of vegetable, meat and fish palatable and relishing if served with it cold and crisp. Palatable, that is, to those who do not dislike olive oil. And some of your people will make the thin mayonaise for themselves. Some will choose their dinner in courses even from an American form bill of fare, and salads are as "familiar in their mouths as household words." Seeing you have mayonaise they are apt to order it plain and with the condiments and relishes before them make their own variations on their own plates.

My Italian friend who almost invariably for his own meals makes a salad, or at least something akin to salad, with oil poured over, looks askance at the vinegar and remarks: "Along the shores of the Mediterranean the people, the wealthy people, the mercantile people, do not use vinegar more than to the amount of a squeeze of a lemon--it is the common people, the people of the interior, the peasants (and he shrugs his shoulders contemptuously)--only the peasants who pour vinegar plentifully over their green stuff and call it salad" A remark which may serve to give the right hang of that Spanish proverb about salad-making: "A spendthrift for oil, a niggard for vinegar, and a madman to mix the salad together" For there are those who think the one who pours in any oil at all is the madman, and at any rate think it will be better to let the spendthrift donate the vinegar instead of the oil. There are also motives of economy in favor of the wrong reading; but we cooks are perfectly disinterested and had just as lief make our dressing without oil as not. The following, if a rather large quantity for fifty persons for dinner, is not too much for a supper salad on a hot summer evening, when the thought alone of all other food is wearisome disgust.