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Fruit Salad Dressing
2 eggs 1 cup whipped cream cup sugar Beat 2 eggs, add sugar, pineapple and lemon juice. Cook in double boiler, stirring constantly until thickened, then set aside to cool. Whip the cream and fold into the mixture just before serving. Very delicious for all fruit salads.
A few grains of paprika teaspoon salt The yolk of 1 egg
A cooked egg custard lightened with whipped cream — essentially a boiled dressing rather than a mayonnaise. The printed ingredient list has come through badly, so read the proportions with care before starting.
- The ingredient list is incompleteAs printed, the quantities for pineapple juice and lemon juice are missing entirely, and the sugar reads only as "cup" — the fraction has dropped out. The trailing fragment (paprika, salt, yolk of 1 egg) does not fit this method and appears to be stray text from an adjacent recipe.
- Working proportionsFor a dressing of this type, 2 eggs and 1 cup cream will carry roughly 1/4 to 1/3 cup sugar and about 1/4 cup combined pineapple and lemon juice, with the lemon in the minority. Treat these as a starting point rather than the book's own figures.
- The hinge: gentle heatKeep the water in the lower pan at a bare simmer and never let it touch the upper pan. Sweetened egg with acid in it curdles readily; the mixture is done when it coats the back of a spoon, around 170F, and it will thicken further as it cools.
- Fresh pineapple juice will not workRaw pineapple contains bromelain, which breaks down protein and will keep the custard slack and thin. Canned or bottled juice has been heated and is inactivated; if using fresh, bring the juice to a boil on its own first and let it cool.
- Cool completely before foldingThe cream must go into a cold base or it will melt and the dressing will slump. Chill the custard over ice or in the refrigerator, then fold the whipped cream in at the last moment, as directed.
- Yield and keepingRoughly 2 cups, depending on how the missing quantities are restored; enough for a fruit salad for eight or so. The custard base should keep a few days covered in the refrigerator; once the cream is folded in, use it the same day.
Cooked dressings like this one were the standard American answer to salad before commercial mayonnaise was on every shelf: eggs, sugar and acid thickened over water, a technique borrowed straight from stirred custard. The fruit-salad version — sweet, pale and folded with whipped cream — belongs to the early twentieth-century fashion for fruit salads served on lettuce as a luncheon course, often with canned pineapple, which by the 1910s and 1920s was becoming cheap, sweet and widely available from Hawaii. A double-boiler dressing was a useful thing to demonstrate: it demanded steady, controllable low heat.