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Salad
Miss Ada King.
Two eggs boiled hard, one teaspoon mustard, two tablespoons vinegar, one cup milk, two heads celery and one-hair cup sugar.
This is a celery salad in the terse style of subscription cookbooks: ingredients only, no method, on the assumption that any cook of 1877 knew what to do with hard eggs and mustard. The dressing is a cooked-style boiled dressing in all but name, and it wants assembling in a particular order.
- The typo"one-hair cup sugar" is plainly an error for one-half cup. Half a cup is a great deal of sugar for two heads of celery by modern taste; a quarter cup gives a dressing closer to what we would now call sweet-and-sour.
- Method, since none is givenMash the hard-boiled yolks smooth with the mustard and sugar, work in the vinegar to a paste, then thin gradually with the milk. Chop the whites and fold them in. Dress the sliced celery no more than half an hour before serving.
- Two heads of celeryCelery of the period was usually blanched pale, and heads were likely smaller than today's. Two modern heads give roughly 8 cups sliced, which is more than this quantity of dressing will coat well; one large head is the better match.
- MustardA teaspoon of "mustard" here most likely means dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard from a jar. Prepared mustard would add vinegar and salt and thin the dressing further.
- Milk, not creamThe vinegar will thicken and lightly curdle whole milk, which is part of how this dressing gets body. Skim milk gives a thin, separating result; whole milk or a mix of milk and cream holds together.
- SaltNone is listed, which is common in these compressed entries. The dressing needs about half a teaspoon or it reads as flat sugar and vinegar.
- YieldAppreciably more than a cup of dressing, given the cup of milk alone, and enough for a salad serving four to six as a side.
Boiled and mock-mayonnaise dressings of this kind — hard yolks, mustard, vinegar, and milk or cream instead of oil — were the American standard well before jarred mayonnaise, partly because good salad oil was expensive and prone to rancidity. Celery was the fashionable salad vegetable of the 1870s, sold blanched in bundles and often set out in tall pressed-glass vases as a table ornament, so a recipe that used up two heads was a seasonal one. The Home Cook Book (Chicago, mid-1870s, in several editions) was compiled from contributions by named local women to raise money for the Chicago Home for the Friendless, which is why the page carries Miss Ada King's name and almost nothing else: the contributors were writing for neighbours who would already know how to mash a yolk.