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Cream Salad Dressing
Two tablespoonfuls of butter, two tablespoonfuls of flour, one cupful of milk; make thick sauce, add gradually four tablespoonfuls of vinegar or lemon juice; when perfectly cold, beat one-half cupful of cream, two tablespoonfuls of fine sugar, a little salt and pepper.
A cooked flour-thickened dressing rather than an emulsion — the ancestor of what later cookbooks call boiled dressing. The instructions trail off at the end, so the assembly needs filling in.
- The hinge: cool it completelyAcid goes into the hot sauce, but the whipped cream goes into a sauce that is perfectly cold. Fold cream into a warm base and it deflates into a thin, greasy liquid. Chill the base over ice or in the refrigerator for at least an hour.
- Adding the vinegarFour tablespoons of acid into one cup of white sauce may look thin or slightly curdled at first. Add it a tablespoon at a time, whisking hard between additions, and it comes back smooth. Lemon juice tends to give a softer result than cider vinegar.
- The unwritten last stepThe original says only to 'beat' the cream, sugar and seasoning, without saying how they join the cold base. Whip the half cup of cream to soft peaks with the sugar, season the cold base with salt and pepper, then fold the cream in with a spatula in two or three additions.
- "Fine sugar"Superfine or caster sugar, which dissolves in cold cream without grit. Granulated sugar pulsed briefly in a spice grinder does the same job.
- Milk and creamWhole milk for the sauce; the half cup of cream needs to be heavy or whipping cream if it is to whip. Half-and-half will not hold air.
- ConsistencyTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to one cup of milk is a thick béchamel — cook the roux a minute or two so it loses its raw taste, but keep it pale. If the finished dressing is too stiff to coat leaves, thin it with a spoonful of milk.
- Yield and useSomething over two cups once the whipped cream is folded in. It suits cabbage, cold potato, chicken and fruit salads better than delicate greens, which the weight of it flattens.
- KeepingRefrigerate and use within two days. The whipped cream slowly weeps, so the dressing wants a brief re-whisking before it goes to the table.
Before commercial mayonnaise was widely sold, American cookbooks of the period offer broadly two kinds of salad dressing: a plain oil-and-vinegar French dressing, or a cooked dressing thickened with flour or egg. Cooked dressings had practical advantages — they kept for a few days in a cool larder, needed no steady hand to emulsify, and used butter and milk rather than the good salad oil many kitchens lacked. This version belongs to the mildest branch of the family: no mustard, no egg, sugar and whipped cream softening the vinegar into something closer to a sauce than a dressing. Sweet, creamy dressings of this kind were often paired with shredded cabbage and with the fruit-and-nut salads then fashionable, and something of that profile survives in the sugared coleslaw dressings sold today.