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For Dressing (Teaspoonful white pepper eggs)
1 teaspoonful mustard. 1/4 teaspoonful white pepper 2 eggs 4 tablespoonfuls lemon juice 1 cupful whipped cream 1 tablespoonful Crisco 1 teaspoonful sugar ½ teaspoonful salt
This is the ingredient panel for a cooked salad dressing lightened with whipped cream — the method sat elsewhere on the page in the original book. What follows is what a competent cook needs to read between the lines.
- No method is printedThe list alone is not workable as written. A dressing of this type is built as a stovetop custard: eggs, lemon juice, sugar, salt and pepper whisked over simmering water with the fat until it thickens, cooled completely, then the whipped cream folded in at the end.
- Cook the egg base properlyThe eggs are the thickener and they need to reach a true custard set — thick enough to coat a spoon, around 160F. Cooked over direct heat rather than a water bath, four tablespoons of lemon juice will curdle them fast.
- Fold the cream into cold dressingWhipped cream added to a warm base collapses and weeps. Chill the cooked mixture fully first, whip the cream to soft peaks, and fold rather than stir.
- CriscoIn 1913 this was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sold solid in a tin. Today's product is a soybean and palm blend reformulated to cut the trans fats to a trace; one tablespoon of any neutral solid shortening behaves the same here. Butter gives more flavour but firms up more in the refrigerator.
- Salt1½ teaspoonfuls in roughly two cups of finished dressing is assertive by modern palates. Start with half and correct after the cream goes in, since the cream mutes it.
- White pepperUsed for appearance rather than heat — black specks were considered a fault in a pale dressing. It is more musty and less sharp than black pepper, so do not substitute one for one by volume without tasting.
- Yield and keepingAbout two cups. The cream means it will not keep like mayonnaise; use it within a day or two, and expect it to loosen slightly on standing. It suits fruit salads, cabbage and cold chicken rather than delicate leaves, which it weighs down.
The Story of Crisco was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco itself went on sale — one of the earliest and most successful examples of a manufacturer commissioning a full cookbook to teach the public what a wholly new ingredient was for. Hydrogenated vegetable shortening had no culinary tradition behind it, so every recipe in the book quietly argues a case: that it can replace butter, lard and suet in turn. A tablespoonful of shortening in a cooked salad dressing is a good illustration of how far the argument was pushed, since the fat here does little that the eggs and cream are not already doing. Cooked or "boiled" dressings of this kind were the American standard for generations before bottled mayonnaise, and the whipped cream folded in at the end marks this as the richer, company version rather than the everyday one.