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Salad Dressing (Yolks of two hard-boiled eggs)
Yolks of two hard-boiled eggs rubbed very fine and smooth, one tea-spoon English mustard, one of salt, the yolks of two raw eggs beaten into the other, dessert-spoon of fine sugar. Add very fresh sweet-oil poured in by very small quantities, and beaten as long as the mixture continues to thicken, then add vinegar till as thin as desired. If not hot enough with mustard, add a little cayenne pepper.-Mrs. Gov. Cheney, New Hampshire.
A hand-beaten mayonnaise of the cooked-yolk school, built on two raw yolks that are never heated at any point. Notes on the archaic terms follow the reason this one should be left on the page.
- Why it fails todayThe two raw yolks are the entire emulsifier and they are never brought to any temperature at all; the finished dressing is served cold. Raw shell eggs carry a recognised risk of Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside the intact egg and is not reliably controlled by vinegar, mustard or salt at these proportions. Use a current mayonnaise recipe instead.
- The vinegar is not a safeguardAcid and mustard were often credited with 'keeping' a dressing. Here the vinegar goes in last and to taste, so the final acidity is unknown and may be well above pH 4.1 — a figure below which acidified mayonnaise is generally considered to control the organism. An unmeasured splash proves nothing.
- Sweet-oilOlive oil. 'Very fresh' is a real instruction: rancid oil was a common complaint, and old oil ruins a raw dressing that has no cooking to mask it.
- English mustardDry mustard powder rather than the prepared paste in a jar. It is hot, and it also acts as a secondary emulsifier.
- Dessert-spoonBetween a teaspoon and a tablespoon — roughly two teaspoons. The measure survives in British flatware but has vanished from American sets.
- "As long as the mixture continues to thicken"The hinge of the method, and sound emulsion practice: oil added in drops and beaten until the mass stiffens, only then thinned with vinegar. Reversing the order, or adding oil in a stream, breaks it.
- YieldThe oil and vinegar are both unmeasured in the original, so no yield can be fixed from the text.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) grew out of Ohio church and ladies'-society collecting, which is why a New Hampshire governor's wife appears among the Marysville and Minneapolis housekeepers; Person C. Cheney served as governor of New Hampshire from 1875 to 1877, though a courtesy title of that kind could well persist after his term. The recipe itself belongs to the older English tradition of salad dressing built on pounded hard-boiled yolks, to which the newer French idea of a raw-yolk emulsion beaten up with oil has been grafted. That transitional shape is common in American books of the 1870s and 80s, before "mayonnaise" settled into a fixed formula of raw yolks and oil alone.