Boiled Dressing

Had the English settlers established the olive tree, as they tried, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, the story of salad in the South would have been a lot different. Since the region had essentially no vegetable oils before the late nineteenth century, vinaigrettes and mayonnaises were confined to the tables of the very rich who could afford imported olive oil. Boiled dressing was the ingenious solution for the rest of the people. (Mayonnaise was once so exotic that Eudora Welty wrote of it