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Mayonnaise Dressing
One teaspoonful mustard.
One teaspoonful powdered sugar.
Half teaspoonful salt.
One-quarter saltspoonful cayenne.
Yolks of two eggs.
One pint olive oil.
Two tablespoonfuls vinegar.
Two tablespoonfuls lemon juice.
Mix the first four ingredients in a small bowl; add the eggs; stir well with a wooden spoon. Add the oil, a few drops at a time, stirring until it thickens. When the dressing is thick, thin it with a little lemon, then add oil and lemon alternately, and lastly the vinegar. When ready to serve, add half a cup of whipped cream if desired.
Mix half of the dressing with the salad, and spread the remainder over the top. -Mrs. E. A. B., Toronto, Canada.
The technique here is sound classical mayonnaise, but the dressing is built on uncooked yolks and eaten without any heat step, which is why it cannot be recommended as printed. The notes below explain the units and the specific risk.
- Why it fails todayThe two egg yolks are never heated at any point, and the finished dressing is served cold and often held for a meal. Raw shell eggs can carry Salmonella internally, not merely on the shell, and no amount of careful stirring addresses that. A current recipe using pasteurised eggs or pasteurised liquid yolk should be used instead.
- Acid is not a safeguardThe four tablespoonfuls of vinegar and lemon juice against a pint of oil and two yolks give a very weakly acidified emulsion. Commercial mayonnaise relies on a controlled pH low enough to inhibit growth; a home dressing of this ratio does not reach it reliably, and the optional half cup of whipped cream raises the pH further.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so "one-quarter saltspoonful" of cayenne is about a sixteenth of a teaspoon — a trace, meant to sharpen rather than heat.
- One pint of oilTwo cups, against only two yolks. That is a rich ratio by the standards of most period mayonnaise recipes, and it is why the recipe insists on adding the oil a few drops at a time and thinning with lemon whenever it stiffens.
- Mustard means dry mustardIn a dressing list of this period, "one teaspoonful mustard" among dry seasonings is powdered mustard, not prepared paste. It acts as a secondary emulsifier as much as a flavouring.
- The wooden spoonSome period sources advise wood rather than metal for dressings, on the grounds that metal discoloured them; the instruction also reflects a kitchen with no mechanical help.
- YieldA pint of oil plus yolks and acid makes roughly two and a half cups of dressing — far more than one salad needs, which explains the direction to dress the salad with half and mask the top with the rest.
Mayonnaise reached English-language cookbooks from French practice in the nineteenth century, and by the turn of the century it had become the standard dressing for the composed salads that community cookbooks of this kind were full of: chicken, lobster, potato, and moulded vegetable salads served cold at luncheons and church suppers. The name is usually traced to the port of Mahón on Menorca, though that derivation is traditional rather than settled, and rival explanations from manier (to handle) and from the Duc de Mayenne circulate in the older literature. The optional whipped cream folded in at the end is characteristic of the period; softened with cream, the dressing was often called a mayonnaise cream, and it was thought more suitable for fruit and delicate vegetable salads than the plain emulsion. The attribution to a contributor in Toronto is typical of the 20th Century Home Cook Book's method: recipes were solicited from readers and housekeepers by initial, which is why the same book can carry several mayonnaises that disagree about proportions.