Why This Strange Boiled Dressing Was Worth Saying Yes To

As promised, this week I was set to make a recipe from 1929 called Boiled Dressing.

There is not one single thing about the sound of that recipe that would make a person think, “Say, let’s make some boiled dressing!”

Nope. Not one thing.

To be fair, I almost skipped it. I stared at the recipe and thought, surely there must be something else in this cookbook that sounds even remotely more appealing. But the next recipe was not much better.

It was called Homemade Nuttose.

Nuttose.

The recipe involved tomato pulp, flour, and nut butter cooked together in a double boiler for two to three hours. I don’t know exactly what Nuttose is supposed to be, but I know what I am not supposed to be doing with my time: stirring tomato pulp and nut butter for three hours.

There was simply no way.

So I made a deal with myself: I would buckle down and make Boiled Dressing this week, and next week I would allow myself to skip Homemade Nuttose. Sometimes self-care looks like a bath. Sometimes it looks like refusing to make something called Nuttose.

As I looked over the ingredients for Boiled Dressing, they seemed mostly harmless. My brain immediately went to: Oh, this is just a cream sauce. There was heavy cream, an egg yolk, lemon juice, cornstarch, salt, and butter. Nothing particularly alarming. No Jell-O mold. No gelatin. No mystery meat. No instruction to put something in a double boiler and walk away for half a day. However, true to form, they listed the butter as “vegetable butter.”

What exactly is vegetable butter?

I had no idea. Maybe it was margarine. Maybe it was an early version of something that came in a tub. Maybe it was one of those things that sounded perfectly normal in 1929 but now makes you wonder whether you could buy it at a hardware store.

I decided not to find out.

Instead, I used my standard Plugrá butter, because in my opinion, very little in life can’t be fixed with good French butter. I may not know what vegetable butter was supposed to be, but I do know that if a recipe starts to look questionable, French butter is almost always the fix.

And I was not wrong.

The recipe came together more easily than I expected. I heated the cream, slowly added it to the egg, butter, and lemon juice, and kept stirring until it thickened. There is something strangely calming about standing at the stove and stirring a sauce, even when you are making something with a name that makes you want to question all of the cookbook decisions that came before it.

While I stirred the Boiled Dressing, I started thinking about hard things. There are so many times in life when my first instinct is simply: Nope. Not going to do that. At the gym, it is having to lift heavier weights than I want to lift. It is adding another mile when I am already tired. It is doing that one exercise that is all the rage, but that makes me feel like I am trying to fold myself into a piece of carry-on luggage.

My first instinct is no.

In relationships, it is having a hard conversation. It is telling someone I am hurt. It is setting a boundary. It is saying, “This is not working for me,” even though every part of me would prefer to smooth it over, pretend I am fine, and avoid any possibility that another person might be uncomfortable.

My first instinct is no.

I am not a confrontational person. I will rehearse a conversation in my head for three days, write a text message, delete it, rewrite it, stare at it for another hour, and then decide maybe I should just let the whole thing go. Hard things often involve confrontation, and confrontation is not something I naturally welcome into my life. But every now and then, I put on my big-girl panties, take a deep breath, and say yes. Yes, I will lift the heavier weight. Yes, I will go a little farther. Yes, I will have the conversation. Yes, I will say what I mean instead of hoping someone reads my mind. And, honestly, I am usually surprised by the results. The hard thing is almost never as terrible as I imagined it would be. It may be uncomfortable. I may still dislike it. I may need a nap afterward. But I am usually glad I did it.

Every time I think about choosing yes instead of no, I hear Taylor Swift’s “the 1” playing on repeat in my head.  That whole folklore album got me through the pandemic. It also had me lifting more weights than I ever had before, which feels like a strange but accurate thing to say about a Taylor Swift album. There were a lot of long walks, a lot of home workouts, a lot of staring out windows, and a lot of songs that made it feel okay to be sad, uncertain, tired, and still trying. Sometimes a song meets you exactly where you are. Sometimes you find yourself making a 1929 recipe called Boiled Dressing and realizing it is not nearly as bad as it sounds.

In the end, I think An Apple a Day cookbook needed a better marketing team in the 1920s. “Boiled Dressing” doesn’t inspire confidence. It sounds like something served at a boarding school where everyone is forced to wear sensible shoes. But it turned out to be a lemony cream sauce. It was smooth, bright, buttery, and surprisingly good. I can imagine it being really lovely spooned over grilled fish. It would also be good over roasted vegetables, asparagus, or maybe even a piece of chicken that needs a little help.

Would I make it again?

Probably.

Would I call it Boiled Dressing?

Absolutely not.

I might call it Lemony Cream Sauce, because that is what it is. And I might also remind myself, the next time I face something difficult, that what I am avoiding could be better than expected.

It could be uncomfortable.

It could be a little strange.

It could require French butter.

But it might still be worth doing.

And next week, unless I lose my mind, we will be skipping Homemade Nuttose.