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Dressing (Tablespoonfuls vinegar eggs)
1 tablespoonful Crisco Pinch of salt 2 tablespoonfuls vinegar 2 eggs 2 tablespoonfuls sugar 1/2 pint whipped cream
This is an ingredient list rather than a method, and the missing part is the part that matters. Comparable cream dressings of the period are built as a cooked custard base — eggs, sugar and vinegar stirred over hot water until thickened, cooled, then folded into whipped cream — but nothing here says so.
- No cooking step at allAs printed, two whole eggs are combined with vinegar, sugar and whipped cream and served. Nothing is ever brought to a temperature that would deal with Salmonella, and two tablespoonfuls of vinegar in a full cup or more of dressing is nowhere near acidic enough to compensate. A dressing of this kind sits at room temperature on a salad plate, which is the worst case for it.
- Nor any holding guidanceWith uncooked egg and no stated cooling, chilling or use-by point, there is no safe way to follow the page as it stands. Use a current recipe for a cooked cream dressing, or a pasteurised-egg one.
- "1/2 pint whipped cream" is ambiguousIt may mean half a pint of cream, which whips to roughly a pint, or half a pint of cream already whipped, which is about half that much dressing. The phrase appears to have been used both ways, and this page gives no clue.
- The vinegar is unspecifiedHousehold vinegar of the period was often cider vinegar at around 4 to 5 percent acidity, sharper and fruitier than distilled white. Two tablespoonfuls against two of sugar reads sweet rather than tart, which points to a fruit salad rather than a vinaigrette.
- No Crisco in itWorth noticing in a book published to sell shortening: this dressing contains no fat but cream.
- YieldDepending on which reading of the cream you take, somewhere between one and two and a half cups -- enough for a fruit or cabbage salad for four to eight.
The Story of Crisco (Procter & Gamble, 1913) was one of the first great single-product cookbooks, published to teach American cooks what to do with a wholly new ingredient: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold as a substitute for lard and butter. Its salad chapter belongs to a moment when "salad" in an American household often meant fruit, canned or fresh, bound with a sweet cream or boiled dressing rather than dressed with oil and vinegar — mayonnaise being fussy and commercial bottled dressings not yet widespread, though they were beginning to appear. Cooked egg-and-vinegar dressings lightened with whipped cream were standard in this style; the printed line here is a shopping list, not a procedure.