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Roquefort Dressing
3/4 cup French Dressing 1/3 cup Roquefort cheese Put the cheese in a bowl and gradually beat in the French Dressing. Add enough paprika to color. Serve on any plain green or vegetable salad.
A two-ingredient dressing whose success rests entirely on what you mean by "French Dressing." Get that right and the rest is a fork and a bowl.
- French dressing, as meant hereIn a book of this vintage this is a plain vinaigrette: roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar, salt, pepper, shaken or beaten until it thickens slightly. It is not the sweet, tomato-tinted orange bottled dressing that took the name in mid-century America, which would fight the cheese.
- Cheese quantityA third of a cup of crumbled Roquefort is about 1.5 oz (45 g). Packed into the cup it will be closer to 2 oz, which makes a thicker, sharper dressing; either works.
- Roquefort itselfTrue Roquefort is a sheep's-milk blue from southern France, salty and quite wet. Any firm blue will substitute, but a drier, milder one such as Stilton will not break down as smoothly and may need a little extra vinegar.
- Order of mixingThe instruction to beat the dressing in gradually is the hinge. Adding all the liquid at once leaves lumps of cheese swimming in oil; a spoonful at a time, mashed against the bowl, gives a creamy emulsion.
- PaprikaUsed purely for colour, as the original says. Sweet Hungarian or plain Spanish paprika is right here; smoked paprika or hot cayenne-heavy blends will take over the flavour.
- Yield and holdingMakes about one cup. It will keep a few days refrigerated; the oil will set firm, so let it stand at room temperature and re-beat before serving.
- SeasoningTaste before adding salt. Roquefort brings a good deal of its own, and a dressing already salted as a vinaigrette can easily go over.
Blue cheese beaten into vinaigrette is a natural extension of the French habit of finishing a salad at table, and Roquefort was the blue most often named in American cookbooks of the period. The instruction to add paprika "to color" is characteristic of the period: paprika was a common finishing garnish, sprinkled over dishes from deviled eggs to creamed fish for appearance as much as taste. The Roquefort name has been protected under French law since the early twentieth century, and cheeses of the same style made elsewhere are generally sold simply as blue.