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Salad Dressing (Yolks of four hard-boiled eggs)
Yolks of four hard-boiled eggs.
Half bottle best olive oil.
Stir together until it thickens. Add one teaspoonful salt, one teaspoonful pepper, one cup mixed mustard. When well mixed, add one-half cup of vinegar.
One egg.
A cooked-yolk dressing rather than a true mayonnaise: the emulsifier is already set, which makes it far more forgiving than the raw-yolk version. Two quantities in the original need judgement before you start.
- Add the oil drop by dropThis is the hinge. Mash the four cooked yolks to a smooth paste first, then work in the oil a few drops at a time until it is thick and glossy; only then move to a thin stream. Cooked yolks emulsify less readily than raw, and oil poured in freely will simply sit on top as a slick.
- "Half bottle best olive oil"Bottle sizes were not standardised, so this cannot be converted exactly; a common size would put half a bottle somewhere around a cup, but treat that as a guess. Work up to it by eye and stop when the dressing is as thick as you want it — four yolks will carry a cup comfortably, more with patience.
- "One cup mixed mustard"Mixed mustard means prepared mustard — dry mustard already worked to a paste with water or vinegar. A full cup against four yolks is overwhelming by modern taste and reads like a scaling error; start with a tablespoon or two and add more if you want the heat.
- A teaspoonful of pepperThat is a genuine teaspoon, and it is a lot by modern taste. Taste as you go; white pepper keeps the colour clean.
- Vinegar goes in last, and thins itAdding the half cup of vinegar will loosen the dressing noticeably. Add it gradually, and expect the final consistency to be pourable rather than spoonable. Cider or white wine vinegar suits it better than harsh distilled.
- The trailing "One egg"The instruction is genuinely ambiguous — it may mean a fifth hard-boiled yolk, a whole cooked egg chopped in, or a raw egg beaten in to firm the emulsion. If you take it as raw, use a pasteurized egg, since nothing here is cooked afterwards; otherwise leave it out with no loss.
- Yield and keepingMade exactly as written it comes to nearer three cups; closer to two if you cut the mustard back as above. Refrigerate in a covered jar and use within three or four days; it will separate slightly and can be whisked back together.
Cooked-yolk dressings like this one were the everyday American salad sauce through the second half of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, and they long outlasted the arrival of true mayonnaise in domestic cookbooks. A hard-boiled yolk pounded to paste could be worked with a fork in a bowl, without the wrist-work and the risk of curdling that raw-yolk mayonnaise demanded before mechanical beaters were common. The heavy hand with mustard and vinegar belongs to the same tradition as boiled dressing, the flour-thickened cousin that dominated American potato and cabbage salads — a sharp, mustardy sauce meant to stand up to plain lettuce, cold meat and leftovers rather than to taste delicately of olive oil.