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Salad Cream Without Oil
1 cupful of best butter. 1/2 cupful of vinegar--large. 6 raw yolks. 1 cupful of thin cream. 1/2 teaspoonful of salt.
Cayenne and white pepper, of each as much as would lie on a dime. Boil the vinegar and butter together in a deep bowl-shaped saucepan. Beat the yolks light. Pour the boiling vinegar and butter to them gradually while still beating, then place the mixture on the fire again. It is very liable to burn at the bottom and must be beaten rapidly till it begins to thicken. Then commence and slowly pour in the cup of milk or cream and continue beating till the salad dressing looks like cream or boiled custard. It must not quite boil else it will curdle. Add the salt and pepper and beat it in a pan of ice water till cold.
A porcelain lined saucepan should be used for the above. If you cannot stay with the salad cream till finished set the saucepan in a pan of boiling water and beat it up frequently as you pass.
A boiled dressing in the older English-American style: egg yolks thickened over heat with vinegar and butter, standing in for the emulsified oil of a mayonnaise. It behaves like a savoury custard and fails the same ways a custard does.
- The hinge: heat, not boilingThe mixture must thicken below the boil — on a thermometer, somewhere in the region of 170-180F, though the acid brings the yolks to setting point sooner than in a sweet custard. The moment it simmers, it breaks into grainy specks that no amount of beating will bring back.
- Use a double boilerThe author's own fallback — setting the pan in boiling water — is the better method from the start. Direct heat on six yolks with this little liquid scorches quickly, which is why the recipe warns that it is very liable to burn at the bottom.
- Porcelain-lined means non-reactiveEnamelled cast iron, stainless steel or glass. Bare aluminium, copper or unlined iron will give the vinegar a metallic taste and grey the yolks.
- "1/2 cupful of vinegar--large"A generous half cup, so roughly 4 1/2 fl oz. Vinegar strength varied a good deal before modern standardisation, so if the finished dressing comes out sharper or flatter than expected, that may be the reason.
- Cayenne and white pepper"As much as would lie on a dime" is a scant 1/8 teaspoon of each, and less if the cayenne is fresh and hot.
- Milk or creamThe ingredient list says thin cream, the method says milk. Either works — half-and-half is the closest modern match to nineteenth-century "thin cream." The recipe has it poured in slowly while the pan is still over heat; keep the stream slow and the beating constant.
- The ice bath is not optionalCarry-over heat in a heavy pan will keep cooking the yolks after you take it off. Beating it cold over ice stops that and gives the smooth, custard-like body the recipe describes.
- Yield and keepingAbout 3 cups, enough for a large bowl of potato, chicken or cabbage salad. Refrigerate and use within three or four days; it will stiffen when cold and can be slackened with a spoonful of cream.
Before bottled salad oil was cheap and reliably fresh in American kitchens, cooked dressings like this one were the ordinary alternative to mayonnaise, and rancid oil was a common complaint where butter was a known quantity. Recipes of the 1880s and 1890s routinely offer a "boiled dressing" alongside the French oil-and-vinegar sort. What sets this version apart is that it uses no flour or cornstarch, both standard thickeners in boiled dressings of the era; the body comes entirely from the six yolks, which puts it technically closer to a savoury sabayon or a hollandaise than to the pale, floury salad dressings sold later in jars. Its appearance in a professional pastry cook's book is unsurprising — the whole procedure is custard-making, and the caution against letting it boil is one a pastry man would already have by heart.