Home › June › Mayonnaise Dressing
Mayonnaise Dressing
½ teaspoon salt.
Few grains cayenne.
Yolks 2 eggs. 1½ tablespoons lemon juice, or ¾ tablespoon each of vinegar and lemon juice. 3/4 cup Olive oil.
PROCESS: Put seasoning in bowl, add egg yolks and mix thoroughly, add oil drop by drop, until four tablespoons have been added, after which larger quantities may be added. Stir constantly. As mixture thickens, add a teaspoon lemon juice or vinegar. Continue adding oil and lemon juice or vinegar alternately until all is used, stirring constantly. All ingredients should be very cold. Set bowl in which dressing is made in a bowl of crushed ice.
A classic hand-beaten mayonnaise, and the method is sound; the printed measurements have suffered at the hands of the scanner. Read the quantities with care before starting.
- Lemon juice quantitiesThe printed page was checked: the dressing takes 1½ tablespoons lemon juice, or ¾ tablespoon each of vinegar and lemon juice. Either reading gives roughly the same total acid for ¾ cup of oil.
- The hingeThe first four tablespoons of oil must go in literally drop by drop, with constant beating. Emulsion failure nearly always happens in that first minute; once the base has thickened and turned pale, the oil can go in a thin steady stream.
- Cold everythingThe instruction to nest the bowl in crushed ice is not decoration; keeping the oil and yolks cold is generally held to help the emulsion form and hold, and the mixture is less likely to break.
- Raw yolksNothing here is cooked. Use pasteurized eggs, or shell eggs from a source you trust, and keep the finished dressing refrigerated and eat it within three or four days. It is not a keeper.
- Olive oilThe olive oil sold for the table in this period was generally milder than a modern peppery extra-virgin, which can dominate and turn bitter under hard beating; a light olive oil, or a neutral oil cut with a little good olive oil, is likely closer to the original taste.
- If it breaksPut a fresh yolk, or a teaspoon of the acid, in a clean bowl and beat the broken mixture into it drop by drop. The rescue works the same way the original build does.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough to dress a salad for six to eight.
Mayonnaise reached American cookbooks through French professional cookery in the nineteenth century, and by the 1900s it was a standard dressing for the composed salads and cold summer plates that fill a book like this one. The name's origin is disputed — it is variously traced to Mahón in Menorca, to the French moyeu, an old word for egg yolk, and to other guesses besides — and none of the accounts is settled. Commercially jarred mayonnaise began appearing in American shops in the years around the First World War; before it took hold, a household batch was worked up at home by hand, with a fork, a whisk or an egg beater, which is why the instructions dwell so insistently on the drop-by-drop addition and the bowl of crushed ice.