Home › Salads › Mayonnaise Dressing
Mayonnaise Dressing
Beat a raw egg (some use the yolks only) with a salt-spoon of salt (using a wooden-spoon) until it is thoroughly smooth, add a tea-spoon mixed mustard made rather thicker than usual; when quite smooth add by degrees (a few drops only at a time) a half-pint of olive-oil, taking care to blend each portion of it with the egg before adding more. This ought to be as smooth as honey, and thick enough so that a spoon will stand up in it; dilute with vinegar until it assumes the consistency of thick cream. A little anchovy may be added if desired. Lemon juice may be used instead of vinegar, or a few drops may be added with the vinegar. This is the smoothest and richest of salad dressings. The oily flavor is entirely lost in combination with the raw egg. When you begin to add the oil, drop a very little at first as it may curdle the egg. This sauce keeps well, if bottled and corked with a glass stopper, and it may be made at any time in advance, if only yolks are used, when yolks are left over from baking. In summer, place oil and eggs in a cold place, half an hour before making.
This is a classic hand-beaten mayonnaise, and the emulsion technique it describes is sound. The problem is the egg: it is never heated at any point, and the recipe then tells you to bottle the result and keep it.
- Raw, unpasteurized eggNothing in this preparation reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and shell eggs can carry it inside the intact egg, not merely on the shell. A dressing built on raw egg and eaten cold gives the organism no obstacle at all.
- The keeping instruction is the real failure"This sauce keeps well, if bottled and corked" assumes a cool larder and a period tolerance for risk. A homemade emulsion of this kind has no measured acidity and no preservative; held at room temperature it is a growth medium, and the small amount of vinegar added at the end is nowhere near enough to control it.
- Made in advance from leftover yolksThe suggestion to use yolks left over from baking may compound the problem: the recipe says nothing about how long such yolks have stood out of the shell, or how cold they were kept, before the dressing is begun.
- Anchovy adds nothing protectiveSalted anchovy in a mayonnaise is a flavouring in trace quantity. It does not act as a cure or a preservative here.
- If you want mayonnaiseUse a current recipe written around pasteurized eggs or pasteurized liquid yolk, with refrigeration and a short keeping time specified.
- On the archaic measures, for readingA salt-spoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon; a half-pint of oil is one cup. "Mixed mustard" means prepared mustard paste rather than dry powder.
Buckeye Cookery (1877, out of Marysville, Ohio) was a household book assembled from contributions by Midwestern women, and the text discussed here is generally associated with it. Mayonnaise itself arrived by way of French professional kitchens; the name is generally traced to Mahón in Menorca, though the derivation has never been settled and rival etymologies from manier (to handle) and from the Duc de Mayenne circulate just as widely. What is striking here is the defensiveness of the prose: the writer feels obliged to insist that "the oily flavor is entirely lost," a reassurance aimed at readers who evidently needed persuading about a half-pint of imported olive oil. The instruction to chill the oil and eggs in summer and to add the oil a few drops at a time is good emulsion practice and has not changed in a hundred and fifty years; only the assumption that the finished sauce could be corked and shelved has.