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Boiled Dressing
¼ cup vinegar
¼ teaspoon salt
¾, tablespoon sugar
⅛ teaspoon pepper
¼ tablespoon flour
⅛ egg-yolk
1 tablespoon mustard
¼ tablespoon butter
Heat the vinegar. Sift the dry ingredients thoroughly, add to the slightly beaten egg-yolk, and beat together well. Pour the boiling vinegar gradually upon the mixture, stirring constantly. Put in the upper part of the double boiler and cook over hot water until it thickens, stirring all the time. Add the butter and remove from the fire. Serve when cold, with or without the addition of cream, which may be whipped.
This kind of dressing may also be bought on the market. When made at home, the beaten whites of eggs or cream, plain or whipped, are often added before serving.
A small-batch cooked dressing, the standard alternative to mayonnaise before refrigeration was common. The whole thing comes together in a few minutes once the vinegar is hot.
- The hinge: temper, don't scrambleThe boiling vinegar must go into the yolk mixture in a thin stream while you beat without stopping. Dumping it in curdles the yolk instantly, and no amount of later whisking will bring it back.
- Quarter-tablespoonsA quarter tablespoon is three-quarters of a teaspoon, and three-quarters of a tablespoon is 2¼ teaspoons. Spoons marked in those fractions are not something most kitchens will have; use fractions of a teaspoon instead.
- The mustardOne tablespoon is dry mustard powder, not prepared mustard from a jar. Against ¼ cup vinegar it makes a sharp dressing; a teaspoon or two is closer to modern taste if you want the vinegar and sugar to show.
- Cook to a temperature, not a clockOver hot (not hard-boiling) water the mixture thickens to a light custard somewhere around 170-175F, typically in a few minutes. Keep stirring into the corners of the pan; the yolk sets at the sides first.
- Flour is the insuranceThe small amount of flour stabilises the yolk and makes it far harder to curdle than a plain custard. Sift it with the salt, sugar, pepper and mustard so it disperses before any liquid touches it.
- YieldRoughly a third of a cup as written, enough to dress a salad for two to four. It doubles and triples cleanly.
- Storing and finishingCool it covered and refrigerate; it keeps three or four days and thickens further as it chills. Loosen with a spoonful of cream or milk before serving, or fold in whipped cream, which turns it into a mild dressing for fruit or cabbage.
Boiled dressing belongs to the era before the electric mixer and the cold pantry, when an emulsion of raw yolk and a cup of oil was both laborious to whisk by hand and quick to spoil. A cooked yolk-and-vinegar dressing used a fraction of the fat, kept better, and suited the vegetable, potato and cabbage salads that fill American cookbooks of the period. The publisher, writing for a broad readership of home sewers and housekeepers, is characteristically pragmatic about it: the note that "this kind of dressing may also be bought on the market" shows that bottled dressings were already available to the reader, and the suggested additions of plain or whipped cream show how the same base was stretched from a sharp dressing for greens to a soft one for fruit.