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Cooked Salad Dressing
3 egg yolks, well 3 tablespoonfuls boilbeaten 2 tablespoonfuls butter tard ing vinegar 1½ teaspoonful sugar Cream or unsweetened condensed milk ½ teaspoonfuls mus- 1 teaspoonful salt Add the boiling vinegar slowly to the eggs. Cook over hot water until thickened, stirring constantly. Mix mustard, sugar, and salt, and add. Beat in the butter. This will keep in a cool place for a long time. When ready to use add an equal bulk of sweet or sour cream, or unsweetened condensed milk.
A boiled dressing of the pre-mayonnaise sort: egg yolks thickened over water with vinegar, held as a concentrate and thinned with cream at the last minute. It was the standard binder for chicken or turkey salad made from Sunday's leftovers.
- The hinge: never direct heatCook the yolks in a bowl set over simmering water, not in a pan on the burner, and stir without stopping. Direct heat scrambles the yolks in seconds and the dressing cannot be brought back.
- Add the vinegar hot, and slowlyBringing the vinegar to a boil and dribbling it into the beaten yolks tempers them; poured in fast it risks curdling them.
- Mustard quantityThe mustard measurement in the original list is unclear, somewhere between one and two teaspoonfuls. Start with one teaspoon of dry English or Colman's-style mustard powder and taste; the intent is a sharp, mustard-forward dressing.
- Butter off the heatThe original adds the butter after the mixture has thickened but does not say to take it off the water; doing so is a safeguard rather than the book's instruction. Two tablespoons for three yolks gives a thick dressing.
- Unsweetened condensed milkThis means evaporated milk, the unsweetened canned product still sold today, not sweetened condensed. Substituting the sweetened kind will make the dressing cloying.
- Storage, revised"Will keep in a cool place for a long time" reflects a period when a cool larder or icebox often did the work of a refrigerator. Refrigerate the concentrate in a covered jar and use it within four or five days; thin with cream only for the portion you are serving.
- YieldThe yolks, vinegar and butter come to roughly half a cup of concentrate, about a cup once diluted with an equal bulk of cream.
Cooked or boiled dressings like this one were the American home cook's answer to mayonnaise before electric beaters and commercial jars made emulsified mayonnaise easy. Vinegar and egg yolk set over hot water gives a stable, tangy, custard-like sauce that keeps far better than an oil emulsion, and it is cheaper to make, since butter and evaporated milk stand in for salad oil. Its appearance in a leftovers book is no accident: a bowl of assertive dressing turns yesterday's roast fowl into chicken salad. Versions of this dressing were common in American cookbooks and church-supper cookery from the late nineteenth century onward, and something of the same approach can be recognized in the sweetened dressings still used for coleslaw and potato salad in parts of the Midwest and Pennsylvania.