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Salad Dressing Made with Butter
Four tablespoonfuls of butter, one of flour, one teaspoonful of salt, one of sugar, one teaspoonful of mustard, a speck of cayenne, one-half cup of milk, half-cup of vinegar, three eggs. Let the butter get hot in sauce pan; add the flour, stir until smooth, being careful not to brown; add the milk and boil up; place the saucepan in another of hot water; beat the eggs, salt, pepper, sugar and mustard together, and add the vinegar; stir this into the boiling mixture, and stir until it thickens like soft custard, which will be in about five minutes; set away to cool. When used, a little whipped cream is an improvement.
A cooked salad dressing of the boiled-dressing family: a butter-and-flour base thickened further with egg, sharpened with vinegar and mustard. It behaves like a savoury custard, and it fails the same way custard does.
- The hinge: keep it off direct heatOnce the eggs go in, the pan must stay in the outer pan of hot water. The mixture should reach the point where it coats a spoon, roughly 170-180F; past about 185F the egg proteins tighten and the dressing turns grainy.
- "One teaspoonful of mustard"Measured by the spoon and beaten in with the other dry seasonings, this is almost certainly dry mustard powder rather than prepared jarred mustard. Whisk it with the dry seasonings so it dissolves rather than sitting in specks.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar of the period was less standardised than today's 5% cider or white wine vinegar, so its sharpness varied. Half a cup of modern vinegar against half a cup of milk is aggressively sharp; taste as it cools and add milk or a little more sugar if it bites.
- Add the acid to the eggs, not the panThe recipe has you beat the vinegar into the eggs and seasonings before that mixture goes into the pan, so the acid is diluted by the eggs rather than poured straight onto the hot milk base.
- Curdling and the fixIf it does break, pull it off the heat at once and beat hard, or push it through a fine sieve while warm. It will still be perfectly good dressing, just less glossy.
- Cooling and storageSkin forms fast on the surface; press plastic wrap directly onto it or stir once or twice while it cools. Refrigerated, an egg-thickened dressing like this keeps about four or five days.
- Yield and useMakes roughly a cup and a half — enough for a large potato salad or a slaw. It sets thick when cold; loosen with milk or the whipped cream the recipe suggests, folded in just before serving.
Boiled dressings like this one were the American household answer to mayonnaise before commercial jars made emulsions easy. Mayonnaise demands good oil and a steady hand; a cooked dressing forgives everything, keeps longer, and uses ingredients any kitchen already had — butter, flour, milk, vinegar, eggs, dry mustard. Turn-of-the-century books carry several versions side by side, distinguished chiefly by their fat: some use cream, some a spoonful of oil, and this one leans entirely on butter, which gives it a rounder, almost sauce-like character. The style survives in the sweet-sour dressing still put on Pennsylvania Dutch hot slaw and wilted lettuce, and in the tang of old-fashioned potato salad, where the flavour comes from cooked egg and vinegar rather than from oil.