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Parisian French Dressing
1/2 cup olive oil. 5 tablespoons vinegar 1/2 teaspoon powdered sugar 1 tablespoon finely chopped Bermuda onion 2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley 4 red peppers 8 green peppers 1 teaspoon salt Mix ingredients in the order given. Let stand one hour, then stir vigorously for five minutes. This is especially fine with lettuce, romaine, chiccory, or endive. The red and green peppers are the small ones found in pepper sauce.
A vinaigrette in name only — as printed, there is no oil at all, which makes this a sharp, chile-spiked dressing rather than the emulsified French dressing elsewhere in the book. Read the pepper line carefully before shopping.
- The missing oilPeriod "French dressings" were generally built on several parts oil to one of vinegar. This one lists none, which may be an omission in the original setting rather than an intention. Taste the finished mixture before dressing anything: five tablespoons of straight vinegar on lettuce is punishing, and oil added to taste brings it nearer the range the name usually implies.
- What the peppers are"The small ones found in pepper sauce" means the pickled bird or tabasco-type chiles sold whole in a vinegar bottle as a table condiment, not fresh bell peppers. Twelve of them, chopped, is genuinely hot. Bottled pickled chiles or a few whole peppers from a jar of pepperoncini-style pickles are the nearest current equivalent; adjust downward on first attempt.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term meant fine-ground white sugar, closer to today's superfine or caster sugar than to the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar in a modern box. Superfine is the better substitute; half a teaspoon of ordinary granulated will dissolve in the vinegar anyway.
- Bermuda onionA large, flat, mild sweet onion, still occasionally sold under the name. Any sweet onion — Vidalia, Walla Walla, or a mild white — behaves the same. A pungent yellow storage onion will dominate the tablespoon called for.
- Why the standing hour mattersThe hour is a maceration: salt and vinegar draw the heat and color out of the chiles and take the raw edge off the onion. Skipping it leaves the dressing tasting of separate chopped things rather than one thing. The five minutes of vigorous stirring afterward is what pulls it together in the absence of an emulsifier.
- VinegarAssume plain white or cider vinegar of ordinary table strength, which is what an unqualified "vinegar" generally indicates here. Wine vinegars are fine and gentler; do not substitute anything labelled as a reduction or glaze.
- Yield and keepingAbout half a cup of base as written, enough for a large salad for four to six once oil is added. It will keep some days refrigerated, though the parsley will darken.
In American cookbooks of the 1890s, "French dressing" simply meant the uncooked oil-and-vinegar dressing, as against the cooked or mayonnaise dressings that dominated genteel salad service; the label distinguished a method, not a nationality, and "Parisian" was the sort of qualifier attached to a version thought a little more refined or a little more assertive than the plain one. What is striking here is the source of the heat: pepper sauce, the bottled small chiles steeped in vinegar, turns up as a shortcut to chile flavor. The recipe is often said to belong to a moment when green salads were becoming a routine part of the American meal rather than an occasional garnish, and cookbooks were obliged to offer more than one dressing.