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German Dressing
1/2 cup thick cream 3 tablespoons vinegar ¼ teaspoon salt Few grains pepper Beat cream until stiff, using Dover Egg-beater. Add salt, pepper, and vinegar very slowly, continuing the beating.
A three-ingredient sour-cream-style dressing that depends entirely on how the acid goes in. Get that wrong and you have curds in a bowl.
- Add the vinegar drop by dropThis is the hinge. Acid poured into whipped cream collapses the foam and can break it into grains of butterfat and whey. Trickle it in while the beater is still turning, and stop as soon as it is absorbed.
- "Thick cream"In period usage this generally meant the heaviest cream available, closest to today's heavy or whipping cream. Light or single cream will not stiffen and is more likely to separate.
- Dover Egg-beaterThe standard American hand-crank rotary beater of the period. A balloon whisk or a hand mixer on medium does the same job; avoid a stand mixer at speed, which overwhips cream quickly.
- Stiff, but not too stiffThe recipe says to beat until stiff; in practice stop at medium peaks. Cream taken to the stiff-and-grainy stage has begun turning to butter and is more likely to separate when the vinegar goes in.
- Vinegar choiceCider or white wine vinegar suits this better than distilled white, which at modern 5 percent acidity is sharp enough to dominate three tablespoons of dressing. Taste before you commit the last spoonful.
- Yield and useAbout one cup once the cream is whipped. Serve promptly.
- It will not keepAn acidulated whipped cream weeps within an hour or two in the bowl and faster on warm potatoes. Beat it just before serving rather than making it ahead.
A cream-and-vinegar dressing is often described as the German-American answer to mayonnaise, and is traditionally traced to the sour-cream and vinegar dressings of central and eastern European kitchens rather than to the oil-based French tradition. Nineteenth-century American cooks are often said to have had cream on hand more reliably than good olive oil, which was an imported specialty item, and a bowl of cream and a rotary beater produced something rich in under a minute. The Dover beater named in the instructions was the ubiquitous kitchen tool of the era, common enough by the 1890s that cookbook writers used the brand as a generic term, much as later writers wrote "Frigidaire" for any refrigerator. The label "German" here reflects the period habit of attaching a nationality to a style of seasoning rather than any single documented original.