This is not a salad dressing cruette, but it plays one on my blog.
Once upon a time, salad dressings did not have their own aisle in the grocery store. In fact, there was once a time, not so long ago, that they were not available in stores at all, except for those of the Miracle Whip variety.
This was also a time when, although French dressing was red, it was not neon red, and it was not so sweet that it made your fillings hurt. Most good cookbooks contained at least one recipe for French dressing back then, and Meta Given’s Modern Encyclopedia of Cooking was no exception.
Ms. Given’s Encyclopedia lives up to its name. Altogether, its pages number 1698, split between two very chunky volumes. My copy, a first edition copyrighted 1947 and printed in Chicago, was given to Ena as a Christmas present from Mrs. Becks in 1948. At some point it was sold for 1 pound, 12.5p, and eventually sold to me for $2.
I think I got the best of this bargain.
Meta Given included two recipes for French dressing in her cookbook. I tried the first, appropriately named “French Dressing No. 1.”
I met my first challenge when Ms. Given called for 2/3 cup of salad oil. Unfortunately, in all of her nearly 1700 pages of cooking wisdom, she neglected to specify what “salad oil” is, and how one manages to extract it from salads for our enjoyment. Since a quick Google informed me that salad oil was oil used for the purposes of preparing a salad, I decided that extra virgin olive oil would suffice.
After adding another 1/3 cup of apple cider vinegar, 3/4 t. salt, 4 t. sugar, 1/16 t. dry mustard, 1/16 t. black pepper, and 1 t. paprika, I hit another snag. Meta wanted me to use 1/2 teaspoon of onion juice.
Now, I’m not really sure that one could purchase onion juice in 1947, or that one could even purchase it today. My suspicion is that it was not readily available. This would leave the cook with the task of extracting a half teaspoon of onion juice from a real, live onion. If I could find my grater, this would probably not be much of a challenge. Unfortunately, the grater is still among my missing implements. I did what any red-blooded American cook would do: I improvised. I grabbed my onion half and went at it with a fork, scraping the heck out of it until it produced oniony, juicy pulp. I squeezed hard. My eyes watered. And I only mangled half an onion before I obtained what I considered to be close enough to a half teaspoon of onion mush/juice/pulp.
The result is what you see above. The dressing tastes all right, but I would amp up the extremely light seasoning and take the oil/vinegar ratio down from 2/1 to 1/1. Fear not, however. Ms. Given offers no less than 34 individual salad dressing recipes! I’m sure we’ll find one to please us. In the meantime, I think I’ll use the leftovers to marinate some meat.
[...] I dutifully chopped my chicken, however, leaving it in 1/4 inch pieces. I didn’t have any fresh parsley, so I omitted that and the green pepper, an ingredient which DH generally dislikes in any form, and so is rarely at my fingertips. I decided instead that I would substitute a tablespoon of minced onion for the green pepper and save myself the trouble of trying to extract juice from another onion. [...]