Home › Salads and Salad Dressings › Mayonnaise Without Egg
Mayonnaise Without Egg
Bake a small potato, take off the skin, mash and add a teaspoonful of salt, one of powdered sugar, one of mustard, and a tablespoonful of vinegar; rub this mixture through a fine sieve.
Now add slowly three quarters of a cup of olive oil and another tablespoonful of vinegar.
An eggless mayonnaise built on baked potato starch instead of yolk. It behaves like a thick emulsified dressing rather than true mayonnaise, and the technique is closer to making aioli by hand than to any modern blender method.
- The hinge: add the oil in a threadThe starch in the potato is a weaker emulsifier than egg yolk, so the oil must go in a few drops at a time at first, whisked hard, and only in a thin stream once the base has thickened. Poured in fast it will separate, and a break of this kind is hard to recover.
- Bake, do not boil, the potatoA baking potato roasted dry at 400F for 45-60 minutes gives concentrated, low-moisture starch. A boiled or steamed potato carries too much water and the sauce will stay thin.
- Work the base while it is warmMash, season and sieve the potato while it is still hot; once cold it firms up and passes through a fine sieve much less cleanly. Letting the sieved base cool before the oil goes in is a sensible precaution, though the recipe does not say so.
- "Mustard" means dry mustard"Mustard" most likely means dry mustard -- A teaspoonful of mustard in a book of this vintage is most probably mustard powder rather than prepared jarred mustard, though prepared mustard was also available. Mustard also helps the emulsion hold.
- Powdered sugarConfectioners' sugar, which in period recipes was often loaf sugar crushed fine. Granulated sugar works here since there is enough liquid to dissolve it.
- VinegarCider or white wine vinegar at roughly 5 percent acidity suits this best. The two tablespoons go in at different stages: the first seasons and loosens the potato base, and the second plausibly thins the finished sauce after the oil has stiffened it, though the recipe does not explain the split.
- Olive oil choiceThree quarters of a cup of a strongly bitter modern extra-virgin oil will dominate the sauce. A mild olive oil, or half olive and half neutral oil, gives a gentler result. The recipe specifies only "olive oil".
- Yield and keepingSomething over a cup, enough to dress a salad for four to six. It thickens considerably in the refrigerator and should keep a few days; whisk in a teaspoon of water or vinegar to loosen before serving.
Eggless mayonnaise recipes appear regularly in early twentieth-century American cookbooks, and they answer several problems at once: eggs were seasonal and expensive, unrefrigerated egg sauces spoiled quickly, and invalid and hot-weather cookery favoured dishes that would sit on a sideboard without turning. A starchy potato supplies both body and a mild flavour that lets the oil and vinegar carry the dressing, and the same trick underlies older sauces thickened with bread or boiled rice.