British Salad Cream

British salad cream is similar to mayonnaise, but it ISN'T mayonnaise. Salad cream is commonly used as a topping for ... wait for it... SALADS, and for hard boiled eggs, boiled potatoes and it is used as a spread for sandwiches and as a dip for vegetables. It seems salad cream was a homemade type of dressing in Britain, with the first commercial brands making an appearance in the World War One era, with Heinz leading the way, with this brand is still heavily identified with salad cream to this day. Salad cream was taken by the British to a number of their colonies, where the creamy delight is still common in some of the now former British colonies. There are many variations in recipes, with some people making mayonnaise first, then adding ingredients to turn it into their version of salad cream.

Ingredients:

 

6 ounces heavy cream, very cold

2 hard boiled egg yolks

1/2 teaspoon dry mustard

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

2 tablespoons white wine vinegar

2 teaspoons sugar

1 heaping teaspoon powdered sugar

1/4 ground white pepper

1/4 teaspoon salt   

Put all of the ingredients into a small blender and blend until it thickens. If the salad cream is too thick, add a teaspoon of milk and stir it in by hand, repeat until the desired thickness is reached, but keeping it a little too thick is best, as the cream will begin to break down the longer you keep it. I tend to like sauces that are thick, I mean THICK (see photos below), so I blend my salad cream until it is the consistency of mayonnaise, but it's my understanding that commercial brands are more like salad dressing; that is, thick, but pourable.

 

 

WORD HISTORY:

Ceiling-This word is related to "conceal" and "color," words of Latin derivation borrowed by English from Latin-based French, and it is distantly related, through Indo European, to "hell/Hell," a word from the Germanic roots of English. "Ceiling" goes back to Indo European "kel/khel," which meant "to cover." This gave Latin the verb "celare," meaning "to cover, to cover up, to hide," which passed to Latin-based Old French as "celer," meaning "to hide, to keep secret," with a secondary meaning of "to cover walls with paneling." English borrowed this as "celen," meaning, "to put a cover over," and not long thereafter, "to cover the walls with paneling" (seemingly then specifically "oak paneling"), circa 1200? A noun, "celynge" developed in the mid 1300s, meaning "the action or process of covering walls with paneling" (the ending "ynge" was an old form of modern "ing"). The 1530s saw the word, now spelled "ceiling," used for "the interior overhead part of a room," with likely influence in meaning from the similar Latin word "caelum," which meant "sky," but used in religious contexts for "heaven," which was usually seen as "in the sky/skies." (Note: Latin "caelum" is thought to be from a totally different source, which makes it unrelated to "ceiling.") The meaning "cover with oak wood paneling" died out over time, but lasted regionally until the second half of the 1800s. The word is used figuratively to indicate an upper limit on something, for example: "The city puts a ceiling on rents," or "The building has a ceiling on the number of occupants because of fire safety regulations."