Ham Salad
Cut up small bits of boiled ham, place in salad-bowl with the hearts and inside leaves of a head of lettuce. Make dressing as follows: Mix in a sauce-pan one pint sour cream, as free from milk as possible, and half pint good vinegar, pepper, salt, a small piece of butter, sugar, and a small table-spoon of mustard mixed smooth; boil, add the well-beaten yolks of two eggs, stirring carefully as for float, until it thickens to the consistency of starch, then set in a cool place or on ice, and when cold pour over salad and mix well.-Mrs.
S. Watson, Upper Sandusky, Ohio.
A cooked sour-cream dressing of the kind American households used before bottled mayonnaise, poured over ham and lettuce. The dressing is the whole difficulty; the salad itself needs no explanation.
- The hinge: do not let it boil hardThe instruction to "boil" belongs to an era of thin, unstabilised soured cream. Cook the mixture over low heat or in a double boiler and pull it off as soon as it coats a spoon; a rolling boil after the yolks go in gives you scrambled egg in vinegar.
- Sour cream then and now"Sour cream, as free from milk as possible" means the thick top layer of naturally soured raw cream, high in fat and low in whey. Modern full-fat cultured sour cream is the nearest thing, though it is leaner than the original and so more prone to breaking under heat — crème fraîche, with its higher fat, holds together better.
- "Stirring carefully as for float"Float was a soft boiled custard poured under floating meringue. The phrase is telling the cook to use custard technique: constant gentle stirring, moderate heat, no shortcuts.
- MeasuresOne pint is 2 cups of cream and half a pint is 1 cup of vinegar — an extremely sharp ratio by current taste. Cider vinegar diluted, or half the quantity, is closer to what most palates now expect. Butter, sugar, salt and pepper are left to judgement: start with 1 tablespoon butter and 1–2 teaspoons sugar.
- Mustard"A small table-spoon of mustard mixed smooth" means dry mustard powder slaked with a little water or vinegar to a paste, not prepared table mustard. Roughly 2 teaspoons of powder.
- YieldAs written the dressing makes close to a quart — enough for several large salads. Half or quarter the dressing unless you are feeding a crowd, and keep any surplus refrigerated for no more than a couple of days.
- The ham"Boiled ham" most likely means ham simmered and cut from the bone rather than anything sliced to order. Thick-cut deli ham or leftover baked ham, diced rather than shredded, gives the same effect; taste the ham first and season the dressing last, as saltiness varies widely.
- AssemblyDress only when the mixture is thoroughly cold, as directed. Warm dressing collapses the lettuce hearts, which are the point of contrast against the ham.
Cooked dressings like this one — cream or milk thickened with egg yolk and sharpened with vinegar and mustard — were common in American kitchens through much of the nineteenth century, well before commercial mayonnaise made emulsified oil dressings the default. They suited a household that had cream and eggs on hand and salad oil only rarely. The Dixie Cook Book is generally traced to the Ohio compilation Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, reworked and retitled for a Southern readership, which explains why a recipe credited to a contributor in Upper Sandusky, Ohio sits in a book with Dixie on the cover. The signed attribution is typical of the genre: these were subscription volumes assembled from the recipe files of real women, and their names travelled with their dishes.