Sixty years ago and before, this simple homemade salad dressing worked well for home gardeners who did not have the hundreds of bottled choices in today's grocery stores.
In fact, some of the grocery store dressings then were variations of French, Italian (which had to shaken hard and poured fast), mayonnaise, and thick 1000-Island.
Today's ranch and vinegarette dressings were unheard of then.
Still, this balanced old-time creamy dressing works well today for several salad types, particularly for the loose-leaf lettuce and coleslaw ones.
Variations of it can be found on the Internet.
Dressing ingredients (primarily for straight or mixed loose-leaf-lettuce salads

• 1-cup fresh real farm cream or fresh store-bought whipping cream; half & half will also work.
  
• 1/4-cup of white granular sugar
• 1/4-cup of cider vinegar

Stir the cream and sugar together in a bowl.
Add the vinegar and stir.
The dressing will thicken upon adding the vinegar.
This amount of dressing will coat 6-quart amounts of lettuce with adequate tossing.
Thus, it can be stretched for larger amounts, or halved for servings of four or less.
Although this dressing has a mild sweet-sour taste to it, it can probably be doctored slightly to preferred tastes.
Lettuce salad ingredients (e.
g.
, red-tip or Simpson black-seed varieties; soft baby spinach leaves can be added)

• 1 to 2 gal loosely packed slightly torn leaf lettuce)
• 4 to 8 cleaned ring-sliced green onions, including the firm parts of their stems, adjusted to taste

Soak-rinse the fresh stem-free leaf lettuce(s) with water, and then tamp dry on/with towels.
Tear the larger pieces into smaller ones.
Clean the onions by peeling the outer layer off, and rinsing before slicing them into rings.
Place the dressing and above ingredients into a large mixing bowl.
Toss carefully until all of the salad is coated with the dressing.
This tossing step will also wilt the lettuce slightly, which compacts its volume.
Coleslaw ingredients

• 1-head of cabbage (cleaned and shredded)
• 1-large purple onion or six green onions (cleaned and chopped or diced)
• 1/3-lb carrots (peeled, cleaned and finely shredded or shaved)
• Alternate: one 1-lb bag of shredded store-bought coleslaw mix

Place the these ingredients into a large mixing bowl.
Add the dressing little at a time and toss until the final coleslaw is creamy, and not overly runny.
Because so many homemade variations of coleslaw dressings exist, e.
g.
, sweet, sour, mustard, egg, oil, vinegar, mayonnaise, spicy, hot, creamy and so forth, this dressing can more-than-likely be doctored slightly to preferred taste.
But, the result might more modern than old-fashioned.
Conclusion.
The parents of our baby-boomers were creative with their cooking and gardening skills.
This basic sweet-sour creamy dressing is one of their better products, although they might not have known it then.
That could be why some of our family friends at the time called it "hay.
" For more old-fashion recipes, see this website.