French Dressing

You might have noticed a trend while following my blog, faithful reader. You might think the only foods I like are desserts and meats and perhaps carbohydrates. While I do enjoy all those things, especially dessert, I also like fruits and vegetables. I prefer my fruits and vegetables fresh or steamed or roasted to crisp-tender (if vegetables, I'm fairly sure I'm not enthusiastic about a steamed plum nor a roasted banana). But I confess I've been avoiding the cooked vegetables after reading how long I should boil them (30 minutes for green beans, e.g.). They read more like vegetable mush with butter. But I am willing to try a salad dressing since the lettuce won't be boiled into submission.

Ingredients needed.

French salad dressing is usually a reddish color usually tasting a bit like tomatoes and on the sweet side. Wikipedia informs me that Worcestershire sauce and paprika are also key ingredients. This recipe is more of an oil and vinegar mixture with a little bit of onion juice. And I served it on a bed of iceberg lettuce (because it was on hand) with a red bell pepper (which I grew in my garden) because iceberg is a bit bland on its own. The recipe was vague on the type of vinegar to use so I used red wine vinegar. Also it calls for onion juice. I'm guessing you get onion juice by microplaning an onion and using that. Even if that's not how to get onion juice, that's what I'm going to do.

French Dressing ala 1905.

French Dressing
(adapted from Fannie Farmer's What to Have for Dinner, 1905)

1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper
1 tablespoons vinegar
2 tablespoons olive oil
drop onion juice

1. Whisk all ingredients together and serve on lettuce.

Results: Not too bad. Mostly it tasted like salty oil and vinegar. Next time I'll cut back on the salt but add more onion since I didn't notice any onion flavor. I'll also cut back on the olive oil; it felt a bit oily. Also, it certainly wasn't the French dressing you see in the grocery store.

Yum.

What I really like about trying these recipes is that they challenge my notion of what-ever-it-is I'm making. Most of the time, the texture and/or flavor is different from what I expect based on modern recipes. And it's fascinating to observe how tastes have changed. The idea of French dressing bring to mind a certain expectation which may or may not be similar to the expectation it raised a century ago.