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Chiffonade Dressing
1 teaspoon minced parsley 1 teaspoon minced chives 3/4 cup French dressing 2 tablespoons capers 1 minced pimiento (optional) 1 hard boiled egg, chopped fine Combine and use on any plain green or vegetable salad.
A cold sauce assembled in one bowl, so nearly everything hinges on what you mean by "French dressing." A few notes on proportions and keeping.
- French dressing means vinaigretteIn American books of this period French dressing is oil and vinegar, roughly three parts to one, with salt and pepper and sometimes a little mustard or paprika. It is not the sweet, orange, tomato-based bottled product that took the name later in the twentieth century; that would swamp the eggs and capers.
- Make the base firstFor 3/4 cup, whisk 9 tablespoons oil into 3 tablespoons wine or cider vinegar with a good pinch of salt and several grinds of pepper. Add the solids only once it is emulsified, or the chopped egg will absorb the vinegar unevenly.
- CapersTwo tablespoons of brined capers should be drained and, if they are the large caper-berry type, roughly chopped. Salt-packed capers need rinsing and a soak, and you should then hold back on the salt in the dressing.
- PimientoThe canned sweet red pimiento of the era is closest to a jarred piquillo or a roasted, peeled red pepper. Pat it dry before mincing; the packing liquid will thin the dressing and turn it pink.
- Chop the egg fine and lateA coarsely chopped egg sinks and clumps. Push it through a coarse sieve or chop to a near-crumb, and stir it in just before serving so it stays suspended.
- Yield and dressing rateThe 3/4 cup of dressing plus the solids makes a good cup or a little more, enough for a salad for six to eight. Because it is thick with solids, dress lightly and toss well rather than pouring it over the top of the leaves.
- KeepingChopped hard-boiled egg puts a short clock on it. Refrigerate and use within a day or two; the parsley and chives will also dull after a few hours.
Chiffonade is French for "made of rags," from chiffon, and in classical kitchen usage it describes greens or herbs shredded into fine ribbons. Applied to a dressing it came to mean a vinaigrette carrying a confetti of minced solids -- herbs, egg, pimiento, capers -- rather than a smooth one, and chiffonade dressing appears in American cookbooks of the early twentieth century alongside French, Russian and Thousand Island. It belongs to a family of egg-and-pickle vinaigrettes that includes sauce gribiche and sauce ravigote, and its presence in a general household book like this one suggests how far the French salad repertoire had been absorbed into ordinary American dinner service, reduced to a list of things to stir together in a bowl.