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Boiled Dressing II
Yolks 4 eggs. 1/2 cup olive oil. 4 tablespoons vinegar 1 tablespoon lemon juice 1½ teaspoons salt 3 teaspoons powdered sugar 1 pint whipped cream Beat yolks of eggs slightly, add gradually one-half of the oil and lemon juice. Cook in double boiler until mixture thickens; chill, and add gradually remaining oil, salt, and sugar. Just before serving add cream.
The printed ingredient list here has clearly lost a line or two in setting: the method calls for egg yolks and oil, neither of which appears above it. Treat the text as a cooked mayonnaise-type dressing and supply the missing quantities from the method's logic.
- The missing ingredientsThe method uses egg yolks and oil that the list omits entirely. The printed text gives no quantity for either, so any figure a cook settles on is a reconstruction from the method's logic rather than a reading of the recipe.
- The hinge: gentle heatThe yolk, oil and lemon mixture must thicken over water that is barely trembling, not boiling. Yolks begin to set from around 150F and scramble as the heat climbs; if the base curdles it is hard to recover, and the cream will not disguise it.
- Powdered sugarIn period usage this meant sugar ground fine, closer to today's superfine or caster than to modern confectioners' sugar, which carries cornstarch. Superfine dissolves cleanly into the chilled base.
- A pint of whipped creamAlmost certainly a pint of cream measured liquid, then whipped, which gives roughly a quart of foam. That is a great deal of cream against four tablespoons of vinegar; fold in half, taste, and add the rest only if the dressing still tastes sharp.
- Chill properly before the cream goes inAdd whipped cream to a base that is even faintly warm and it will slacken and weep within minutes. Cool the cooked base to refrigerator temperature, which takes an hour or more, or spread it thin in a shallow pan to hurry it.
- TimingThe instruction to add the cream just before serving is not optional; the lightened dressing does not hold, while the uncreamed base can be kept covered in the refrigerator for a few days and finished in batches.
- Yield and useA generous quantity, the cooked base plus about a quart of whipped cream, suited to a large bowl of potato salad or to cold chicken, salmon or a fruit salad.
Boiled dressings belong to a moment when mayonnaise was still hand-made and expensive in both oil and effort. Cooking the yolks with acid gave a stable, forgiving emulsion that kept in the icebox and did not break on a warm table, and the technique appears in American household books of the later nineteenth century, generally in several graded versions: a plain one thickened with flour and milk, and a richer one like this that is essentially a cooked mayonnaise lifted with whipped cream. The numbering simply marks this as the second of those variants. The cream folded in at the last moment marks it as the company version, for a salad going to the table rather than a lunch pail.