When oil was too rare to be used on salads

#1

I wanted to share this salad dressing recipe that I came across in my old Joy of Cooking, mainly because its intro is a charming reminder that vegetable and seed oils are a very recent invention.

Midwestern Cream Dressing
about 3/4 cup
This is a classic–a legacy from early farming days, when oil was too rare to be used on salads. It is particularly good on soft leaf lettuces and on potato salads and slaws.

Whisk together in a small bowl:
1/4 cup cider vinegar or white wine vinegar
1/4 cup sugar
2 tablespoons light cream
2 teaspoons celery seeds or poppy seeds
Salt and cracked black peppercorns to taste
Taste and adjust the seasonings. Use immediately or cover and refrigerate

If you make this, you’ll obviously want to replace the sugar with a keto-friendly sweetener and possibly scale back on the amount to suit your keto palate. Also, this is from the 1997 edition, which came out amidst the low-fat craze and was widely criticized for having a heavy hand in “low-fatting” and otherwise editing some old classics. Someone with an older edition might check to see if the “light cream” was originally just plain “cream” or if there was a bit more of it.

(Bacon is a many-splendoured thing) #2

I would guess that the actual recipe called for a lot more cream and no sugar. Go back to the days before seed oils came on the market (thank you, Crisco!) and sugar was a lot more expensive and less common, too.

Franklin’s advice for dressing a salad was to be a miser with the vinegar and a spendthrift with the oil. I have no idea what the colonists would have used as oil on their salad dressings.

Of course, this advice might not have come from Franklin at all. Wasn’t it Lincoln who said that 87% of all Internet attributions are inaccurate? :grin:

#3

I dug up an old copy of Joy (from 1964) and the recipe doesn’t appear at all. Some Googling finds a similar dressing that uses heavy cream with the writer commenting that half-and-half will do in a pinch, but not whole milk.

There’s a version claiming a German origin that uses some sugar, but much less, swaps the vinegar for lemon juice, and has the cream and lemon juice in inverse proportions to the Joy recipe:
INGREDIENTS

  • 1⁄4 cup cream (or half and half)
  • 2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
  • 2 teaspoons sugar
  • salt and pepper, to taste

There’s a version from Jacques Pepin that he says comes from the area of France where he grew up. This one has no sugar and there’s lots more cream:

THE CREAM DRESSING:

  • 1 tablespoon good red-wine vinegar
  • ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
  • ¼ teaspoon salt
  • 6 tablespoons heavy cream

Another variant, also with heavy cream and lots more of it, again with lemon juice instead of vinegar, and no sugar comes from the book Tasty: a 1/2 cup of heavy whipping cream and a few tablespoons of Dijon mustard whipped to soft peaks, then flavored with a little lemon juice, a little salt, and a little pepper.

The one constant with most of these recipes is they suggest using the dressing for plain lettuce (not with the usual added tomatoes, mushrooms, carrots, cucumbers, etc.). Only Joy also suggests potato salad.

Anyway, it’s salad dressing. Throw some stuff in a bowl and adjust to taste. :grinning:

(Randy) #4

It was George Washington. :grimacing:

(Georgia) #5

Or Thomas Jefferson?