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Mayonnaise Dressing
One rounded tablespoon of butter, one and one-half teaspoons of sugar, one-fourth teaspoon of salt, one teaspoon of mustard, two tablespoons of oil, two tablespoons of vinegar, dash of red pepper, yolk of one egg. Beat butter until very smooth; add yolk of egg and beat again, then add mustard, sugar, salt and red pepper, beating all the time-the more it is beaten the better it will be. Then alternate with the oil and vinegar, a few drops at a time. or less of the ingredients may be added to suit the taste.
— Mrs. William Joesbury
More
This is a butter-based emulsion rather than the oil-heavy mayonnaise of a modern jar — closer in spirit to the American "boiled dressing" family, though nothing here is cooked. The hinge is temperature: the butter must be soft enough to cream but not melted, or the dressing will never come together.
- Butter temperatureTake the butter to a true room temperature, around 65-70F, and beat it to a smooth paste before the yolk goes in. Melted or greasy butter will not hold the vinegar, and cold butter will stay lumpy no matter how long you work it.
- "One teaspoon of mustard"Probably dry mustard powder rather than prepared. If you use prepared mustard instead you will be adding more vinegar and a milder flavor; reduce the vinegar slightly to compensate.
- Red pepperCayenne. A dash means a pinch — perhaps 1/16 teaspoon. Paprika is not a substitute here; the recipe wants heat, not color.
- Adding the oil and vinegarA few drops at a time is not rhetorical. Any neutral oil works; if you use a strong olive oil it will dominate a dressing this small. Alternating acid and oil, as directed, is more forgiving than adding all the oil first.
- Raw yolkThe yolk is never heated. Anyone cooking for young children, pregnant women, the elderly or the immune-compromised should use a pasteurized egg, and the dressing should be refrigerated and used within a day or two.
- If it breaksStart a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the split mixture into it drop by drop. The likelier cause is adding the liquid too fast.
- The garbled lineThe sentence "or less of the ingredients may be added to suit the taste" is missing its opening words, likely "More or less." It is simply an invitation to adjust the seasoning.
- Yield and servingAbout 1/3 to 1/2 cup. The butter content will firm it up in the refrigerator; let it stand a few minutes and stir before using it on potato salad, cold chicken, or shredded cabbage.
Butter-bound "mayonnaise" appears in American community cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cost and quality of imported olive oil are often cited as a reason cooks leaned on butter instead, though how widely that motive applied is hard to document. Here just two tablespoons of oil do the work that a French recipe would give a cup or more. The result sits alongside the era's cooked "boiled dressings" thickened with egg and flour, both loosely called mayonnaise in the American sense of a rich, tart salad sauce rather than a specific technique. The attribution to Mrs. William Joesbury More is typical of the genre: contributor collections of this kind commonly preserved spelling and grammar as submitted, which may be why the last sentence here arrives with its head cut off.