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Italian Salad Dressing
This is especially nice. Endive, chicory or escapole, all these greens are good for dinner salads. Coming in the winter, they can be used the same as lettuce. Put into a bowl half a teaspoonful of salt, quarter of a teaspoonful of white pepper and a teaspoonful of tomato paste; add gradually four tablespoonfuls of olive oil, beating all the time; cut into small pieces one clove of garlic; with the back of a spoon rub the garlic and the paste well into the oil; add one tablespoonful of tarragon vinegar, beat thoroughly, strain, and it is ready to use.
A straight vinaigrette built as an emulsion rather than shaken, with tomato paste doing the work of a binder. Nothing here needs updating so much as clarifying.
- "Escapole" is escaroleThe book's spelling is phonetic. Escarole, endive and chicory are all bitter winter chicories, which is why the author groups them and notes they arrive when lettuce does not.
- Tomato paste, then and nowEarly tomato pastes were generally more reduced and saltier than what comes in a modern tube or tin, though we cannot say from the recipe alone what product the author had. A teaspoon of modern paste is close enough; if your paste is salty, go easy on the half-teaspoon of salt.
- The hinge is the order of workSalt, pepper and paste go in first and the oil goes in gradually, beating. Beating the oil into the paste this way gives a thicker, better-combined dressing than tipping oil and vinegar in together.
- Rub the garlic, do not mince itCrushing a cut clove against the bowl with the back of a spoon draws out juice without leaving raw fragments. The dressing is strained afterward, so the garlic is there for perfume only.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and worth seeking out; it is usually a white wine vinegar infused with tarragon, more aromatic than plain vinegar. White wine vinegar with a few bruised tarragon leaves steeped in it is the nearest substitute.
- Ratio and seasoningFour tablespoons oil to one of vinegar is a milder 4:1, against the 3:1 commonly recommended today. Add a second teaspoon of vinegar if the dressing tastes flat.
- YieldAbout a third of a cup, enough to dress a large head of escarole or two heads of endive.
Endive, escarole and chicory come in through cold weather, which is the point the author makes in the first two sentences. The dressing itself is an ordinary vinaigrette given an Italian label chiefly by the tomato paste and the garlic, two ingredients that many Anglo-American cookbooks of the period still used sparingly. The instruction to strain the garlic out rather than leave it in fits that pattern: the flavour was wanted, the substance was not. Cookbooks of this period often attached national names to recipes on the strength of a single characteristic ingredient, so "Italian" here describes an idea rather than a documented regional formula.