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Cream Salad Dressing
Beat two or three raw eggs well, add one teaspoonful of sugar, one-half saltspoonful of salt, the same of mustard, three tablespoonfuls of vinegar and finally one tablespoonful of cream. Put the dish containing these into a basin of boiling water and stir until the mixture becomes as thick as rich cream. The water in the bowl should be kept boiling all the time and it will then only take about five minutes to finish it. Remove the basin and allow it to get cool, when it will be ready for use.
A boiled dressing rather than a mayonnaise: the eggs themselves do the thickening, with no oil emulsion to break. Everything depends on stopping while it is still a custard.
- The hingeStir without pause and pull the bowl off the water the moment it coats the spoon like heavy cream. Egg and vinegar set fast, and a few seconds too long gives you sweet-sour scrambled egg with no way back.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so half of one is an eighth of a teaspoon. That applies to both the salt and the dry mustard here.
- "Dish" and "basin"The wording is confusing because the original swaps the two words: the ingredients go in a "dish" set into a "basin" of boiling water, yet later the water is "in the bowl" and it is the "basin" that is lifted out. In practice, put your ingredients in a heatproof bowl and set it in a pan or basin of boiling water as directed, lifting it out at the end. A double boiler does the same job.
- Vinegar strengthThree tablespoons of modern 5 percent distilled vinegar is sharp against one tablespoon of cream. Cider or white wine vinegar suits the dressing better, and it is worth tasting before it cools, since chilling mutes the sugar.
- Egg count"Two or three" is a real range: two eggs give a pourable dressing, three a spoonable one closer to a sauce. Start with two if you want to dress lettuce.
- Temperature and eggsThe mixture thickens somewhere around 160-175F, which is also where egg is considered safe, but it is easy to call it done early. A thermometer reading of 160F settles it, and pasteurized eggs are sensible if the dressing is going to sit out on a buffet.
- Yield and keepingTwo eggs make roughly two-thirds of a cup, enough for a large salad for four. Cover and refrigerate; use within three days, and whisk in a spoonful of cream if it stiffens.
- What to put it onBoiled dressings were built for sturdy things rather than delicate leaves: shredded cabbage, cold potatoes, chopped celery and apple, cold chicken.
Oscar Tschirky's book appeared in 1896, when a cooked egg dressing was the ordinary household alternative to a hand-beaten mayonnaise. Bottled salad oil was expensive and inconsistent in American kitchens, and beating oil into yolks by hand was a job; a dressing thickened by heat instead used one tablespoon of cream and a few minutes over the stove, and it was often said to keep better in an unrefrigerated pantry because of the vinegar. Boiled dressing of this kind is the ancestor of the tangy, mustard-forward sauce still associated with Pennsylvania Dutch cole slaw and hot potato salad, and it is sometimes credited with the care older American recipes take to distinguish between "salad dressing" and "mayonnaise" — later manufactured products preserved that distinction, though it rests on later legal standards of identity for mayonnaise rather than on household usage.