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Mayonnaise Sauce
Mix in a two-quart bowl one even tea-spoon ground mustard, one of salt, and one and a half of vinegar; beat in the yolk of a raw egg, then add very gradually half a pint pure olive-oil (or melted butter), beating briskly all the time. The mixture will become a very thick batter. Flavor with vinegar or fresh lemon-juice. Closely covered it will keep for weeks in a cold place, and is delicious.
This is a straightforward hand-beaten mayonnaise, but the storage instruction puts it outside what can be recommended now. The notes below explain the measurements and the specific problem.
- Raw yolk, never heatedThe yolk is the only binder and the sauce is never brought to any temperature at all. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella Enteritidis inside an intact, clean shell, and nothing in this method inactivates it.
- "Keep for weeks in a cold place"A nineteenth-century cellar or spring house ran well above modern refrigeration. Holding a raw-yolk emulsion for weeks at cellar temperature allows both salmonella and spoilage organisms to multiply; commercial mayonnaise keeps because it is made with pasteurised egg and held at a much lower pH.
- Not enough acid to compensateNot enough measured acid -- One and a half teaspoons of vinegar against a cup of oil and a yolk leaves the sauce well above the acidity that makes some modern mayonnaises microbiologically stable. The recipe does call for further flavouring with vinegar or lemon juice at the end, but the amount is unspecified and this is not a measured acidification. Use a current recipe if you want mayonnaise.
- Half a pint of oilThat is one US cup — a large amount of oil for a single yolk. The emulsion will hold if the oil goes in drop by drop at first, but a single yolk is close to its practical limit at this volume.
- "One and a half of vinegar"The recipe drops the unit; read it as a teaspoon and a half, matching the mustard and salt measured just before it.
- Melted butter as the alternativeButter mayonnaise sets firm when chilled and is inclined to break when warmed, since much of the butterfat is crystalline at refrigerator temperature. The butter option is usually explained by the cost and poor condition of imported olive oil, though the recipe itself gives no reason.
- The two-quart bowlFar larger than the volume of sauce requires, leaving room to work the whisk hard without throwing the mixture out. Beating briskly throughout is what shears the oil into droplets small enough to stay suspended.
Buckeye Cookery came out of Marysville, Ohio: the 1877 Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox, was a revision of the 1876 Centennial Buckeye Cook Book, a subscription book assembled from contributions by local women. The name is often traced to the Spanish port of Mahon on Menorca, taken by a French force in 1756, though that derivation is traditional rather than documented and rivals have long been proposed. Complaints about adulterated and rancid olive oil were common in the period, and melted butter appears as an alternative in a number of nineteenth-century recipes, this one included.