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A Simple Mayonnaise Dressing
Yolk of one raw egg, one level teaspoonful of dry mustard, one saltspoonful of white pepper, a small pinch of cayenne pepper, juice of half a lemon. Mix these ingredients with a wooden spoon until they have a creamy white look, then add drop by drop three gills of salad oil, stirring constantly. If it thickens too fast add a little of the juice of the second half of lemon, then add gradually four tablespoonfuls of strong vinegar. Keep cool until used. This is easily made and very nice. Two eggs beaten light.
Lump butter size of egg.
An uncooked-yolk mayonnaise of the standard nineteenth-century type, with a few terms that no longer appear on measuring spoons. It is worth reading for what it shows about hand-emulsified dressings, but it should not be made in this form.
- Raw yolk, never heatedThe single egg yolk is never brought to any temperature at all, and the finished dressing is only "kept cool until used" for an unstated period. Salmonella in a shell egg is an interior risk, not merely a surface one, and although lemon juice is in the bowl from the start and vinegar is added at the end, the dressing is never held at an acidity and time known to reduce the hazard. Use a current recipe built on pasteurized egg or pasteurized yolk product instead.
- "Keep cool until used"In a house with an icebox this meant a temperature well above modern refrigeration, and the recipe sets no limit on how long the dressing may sit.
- A gillHalf a cup. Three gills is a cup and a half of oil to one yolk, which is at the upper end of what a single yolk will carry and explains the drop-by-drop instruction and the lemon juice held in reserve.
- A saltspoonfulA quarter teaspoon, from the small spoon that sat in an open salt dish at each place setting.
- "Strong vinegar"Household vinegar of the period varied in strength and was not held to the 5 percent acetic acid standard now sold. Four tablespoons of it after a cup and a half of oil would thin the dressing considerably.
- Salad oilIn household books of this period this usually meant olive oil, sometimes cottonseed. It is not a neutral seed oil in the modern sense.
- The stray last two sentences"Two eggs beaten light. Lump butter size of egg" belongs to no part of this dressing, and appears to be a fragment of an adjoining recipe.
Hand-beaten mayonnaise is generally traced to French cookery, entering American household books over the course of the nineteenth century, and by 1900 was a fixture of the salad chapter, at a moment when salads themselves are often said to have been gaining acceptance at ordinary tables rather than merely fashionable ones. The whole technique depends on lecithin in the yolk holding oil in suspension, which is why the instruction is to add the oil drop by drop and why the writer offers lemon juice as a rescue if the emulsion tightens too fast. A wooden spoon is specified, though the recipe itself gives no reason for it. Books of this era routinely distinguish a "simple" or "plain" mayonnaise like this one from the boiled or cooked dressings, the latter thickened with egg over hot water.