Shrimp Salad
To one can of shrimps, well washed and broken, add six small sticks of celery. The mayonnaise sauce is made of the raw yolks of two eggs, well beaten; a teaspoonful of salt and half as much mustard powder, worked well into the egg. Add a pint of good oil, pouring in a few drops at a time; when the sauce is very stiff, add a small pinch of cayenne pepper and the juice of one lemon; pour over salad just before serving.
A plain composed salad whose real content is the mayonnaise. The proportions given for the sauce are at the outer edge of what two yolks will carry, so that is where attention belongs.
- The hinge: oil rate and quantityA pint of oil to two yolks is at the upper end of the usual range, though within it; the greater risk is adding the oil too fast at the start. Keep to the drop-by-drop start until the base has visibly thickened, and if the sauce feels precarious, make half the quantity.
- Raw yolksThe sauce is never heated. Use pasteurized eggs, or shell eggs from a source you trust, and keep the finished mayonnaise refrigerated and use it within a couple of days rather than holding it at room temperature as was once normal.
- "One can of shrimps"Can sizes were not standardised, so the quantity is approximate. Cooked, peeled shrimp, coarsely chopped, can be substituted for far better texture. Canned shrimp still exists but wants the thorough rinsing the recipe specifies to shed its tinny brine.
- "Six small sticks of celery"Sticks here means ribs, not the whole bunch, and small ones at that. Diced fine, six ribs give a modest amount of celery relative to the shrimp.
- Mustard powder is structuralThe half teaspoon of dry mustard is not only seasoning; mustard powder helps stabilize the emulsion. Work it into the yolks with the salt before any oil goes in, as written.
- Lemon last, and it will loosen the sauceAcid added to a very stiff mayonnaise thins it noticeably. That is expected here — the sauce is meant to be pourable enough to coat the salad, not to hold a peak.
- Dress at the last momentShrimp and celery both weep. Combine, chill separately, and pour the sauce over just before serving as directed, or the dressing slackens and pools.
- YieldThe salad serves four to six. The pint-of-oil sauce makes considerably more mayonnaise than the salad needs.
Shrimp salad belongs to the late nineteenth-century vogue for cold composed salads bound with mayonnaise, a course that arrived on American middle-class tables alongside reliable factory-pressed salad oils and, crucially, cheap canned seafood. Gulf Coast and Atlantic canneries were shipping tinned shrimp nationwide by the 1880s and 1890s, which is why a book like this can open a shrimp recipe with "one can" and expect every reader to know the size. The mayonnaise itself is handled as a matter of course, with no whisking advice beyond "a few drops at a time" — a sign that hand-built emulsions were still routine kitchen work rather than a technique needing explanation. Celery, then a relatively expensive and prized vegetable, does the same job in dozens of period salads: crunch, bulk, and a little prestige.