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Mayonnaise Dressing
1/2 Teaspoonful Dry Mustard ½ Teaspoonful Salt 1 Tablespoonful Lemon Juice or Vinegar 1½ Cupfuls Wesson Oil Place the whole egg in a bowl, put in the dry ingredients and add the lemon juice or vinegar. Beat these together a few seconds with a Dover egg beater and add a small amount of Wesson Oil. Beat until the dressing begins to thicken. Then add the oil in larger amounts until the dressing is of the desired stiffness.
A straight cold-emulsion mayonnaise from a branded oil cookbook. The ingredient list omits the egg, which appears only in the method: one whole egg.
- The hinge: add the oil slowly at firstThe first few additions must be tiny — a teaspoon at a time — and fully beaten in before the next. Once the emulsion has visibly thickened it will take oil in a steady stream. Adding too fast at the start is the one thing that breaks this dressing.
- Wesson OilIn this period Wesson was a refined cottonseed oil, prized because it was nearly flavourless and stayed liquid. Any neutral oil works; use a mild one, since 1½ cups of strong olive oil will dominate a single egg.
- Dover egg beaterA hand-cranked rotary beater. A whisk, an electric hand mixer on low, or an immersion blender all do the job; with a blender or food processor, dribble the oil through the feed opening.
- Whole egg, not yolkMany contemporary recipes used yolks only. A whole egg makes a lighter, paler, slightly looser dressing and carries this much oil comfortably.
- Raw eggNothing here is cooked, so the egg is eaten raw. Use a pasteurised egg if you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, and keep the finished dressing refrigerated.
- Salt level1½ teaspoons of salt for one egg and 1½ cups of oil is on the assertive side by modern taste. Start with a teaspoon and correct at the end, once the emulsion is built.
- If it breaksBeat a fresh egg in a clean bowl and add the split mixture into it slowly, exactly as you would add oil. It will come back.
- Yield and keepingAbout 1¾ cups. Refrigerate in a covered jar and use within three or four days; homemade mayonnaise has no preservatives and separates as it ages.
Cookbooks like this one were published by manufacturers rather than authors: Snowdrift was the Southern Cotton Oil Company's cottonseed shortening, Wesson its sister brand of refined cottonseed oil, and the recipes in the book exist to demonstrate one or the other. The pairing is not accidental — cottonseed oil was the byproduct that turned the Southern cotton crop into a grocery business, and by the early twentieth century it was widely used in American salad dressings on price and neutrality alike. Mayonnaise itself is far older, generally traced to French cooking of the late eighteenth century and named, by the usual account, for Mahón in Menorca; what is new here is the industrial oil, the cheap rotary egg beater, patterns of which were patented from the 1850s onward, and the assumption that an ordinary household would make a cup and a half of dressing at home rather than buy it in a jar.