Lettuce Salad
Take the yolks of three hard-boiled eggs, add salt and mustard to taste; mash it fine; make a paste by adding a dessert-spoon of olive-oil or melted butter (use butter always when it is difficult to get fresh oil) ; mix thoroughly, and then dilute by adding gradually a tea-cup of vinegar, and pour over the lettuce. Garnish by slicing another egg and laying over the lettuce. This is sufficient for a moderate-sized dish of lettuce. - Mrs. Col.
Reid, Delaware, Ohio.
A hard-yolk dressing of the sort that preceded bottled mayonnaise in American kitchens. It comes together in a bowl in five minutes; the only real decision is how much vinegar you actually want.
- The vinegar is the hingeA tea-cup is usually reckoned at roughly 3/4 cup, and against two teaspoons of fat that is punishingly sharp by modern taste. Home-made cider and wine vinegars were less standardised than today's 5% product and their strength is hard to guess; add the vinegar gradually as directed and stop when the dressing tastes right, which may be at a third of the stated amount.
- Dessert-spoonBetween a teaspoon and a tablespoon, conventionally about 2 teaspoons. Given how much vinegar follows, you may want considerably more oil than this.
- MustardMost likely dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard from a jar. Start with a scant 1/4 teaspoon; its pungency develops once wetted, so taste again after a few minutes.
- Butter instead of oilThe parenthetical is a real 19th-century problem: imported olive oil reached inland towns rancid or not at all. Melted butter works, but it firms up when it hits cold lettuce, so use it just warm and dress immediately.
- Making the pastePush the cooked yolks through a sieve rather than mashing with a fork. Lump-free yolk is what lets the dressing emulsify into something creamy instead of grainy.
- Dress at the tableA vinegar-heavy dressing collapses tender leaf lettuce within minutes. Pour it over just before serving, not in the kitchen.
- Yield"A moderate-sized dish" is not defined; figure roughly two heads of soft leaf or Bibb lettuce, serving perhaps four to six as a side.
Egg-yolk dressings like this one sit between the old English "salad sauce" of the eighteenth century and the mayonnaise that would become a commercial product in the early twentieth. The technique is the same in either case, a fat carried in an emulsion sharpened with acid, but here the emulsifier is already-cooked yolk, which is far more forgiving than raw and needs no whisking skill at all. That reliability is presumably part of the appeal. The instruction to substitute butter when fresh oil is hard to get is the most revealing line on the page: good olive oil was an import, expensive and prone to turning in transit and storage, and a cook in Ohio could not count on it. The Dixie Cook Book credits contributors by name and town, and Mrs. Col. Reid's attribution places this squarely in the network of subscription cookbooks assembled from readers' own kitchens.