Home › Salads › For the Cream Dressing
For the Cream Dressing
Whip one-half cupful of cream until it is solid froth, add slowly, beating all the time, three tablespoonfuls of lemon juice, one quarter of a teaspoonful of salt and a few grains of cayenne.
A three-minute salad dressing built on whipped cream rather than oil, of a type that shows up constantly in turn-of-the-century American cookbooks. The only real trick is keeping the cream from breaking as the acid goes in.
- Add the lemon juice drop by dropThis is the hinge. Three tablespoons of acid poured into half a cup of whipped cream at once will thin and curdle it. Drizzle it in while beating steadily and the dressing stays thick and glossy.
- Cream, and which kindHousehold cream around 1900 was not standardised and varied a good deal in richness, but a dressing like this needs cream rich enough to whip. Use heavy or whipping cream; half-and-half and light cream will not whip. Half a cupful of liquid cream yields roughly a cup of whipped.
- Everything coldChill the cream, the bowl and the beater. Cream whips reliably below about 50F and sulks above it.
- "Solid froth"Stop at firm peaks, not stiff. Cream beaten to the point of graininess is already on its way to butter, and the lemon juice will finish the job.
- A few grains of cayenneA pinch, no more than an eighth of a teaspoonful. The phrase recurs in cookbooks of the period, where the cayenne appears to sharpen the background rather than register as heat.
- Yield and keepingAbout one cup, enough to dress a salad for four to six. It softens within an hour or two, so make it just before serving and rewhisk briefly if it slackens.
- What it goes onSuits delicate salads in the period style: shredded lettuce, cabbage slaw, fruit salads, cold chicken or a Waldorf. It is rich and mild, and will be lost on bitter greens.
Cream dressings occupy a distinct branch of the American salad family, separate from both the French oil-and-vinegar and the eggy mayonnaise. They spread with the domestic-science movement of the 1880s and 1890s, whose teachers favored dressings that were quick and mild, and it is often suggested that part of the appeal was avoiding the raw oil many households were said to find coarse or indigestible. Lemon juice rather than vinegar is generally taken as the mark of a genteel version, aimed at fruit and chicken salads rather than pickled vegetables. The technique may also have depended on an ingredient that was newly reliable: mechanical cream separators and improved rail shipping are usually credited with making consistently heavy cream available to urban kitchens in a way it had not been a generation earlier, and hand egg-beaters had by then made whipping it a matter of minutes instead of arm-aching labor.