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Cooked Mayonnaise Dressing
Mix in top of double boiler 2 tablespoons flour 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 1/2 teaspoon paprika and 1/2 teaspoon mustard. Add 1/4 cup vinegar and 2 tablespoons salad oil. Stir until smooth. Add 1/2 cup hot water and cook 15 minutes in double boiler, stirring occasionally. Cool and add 1 egg yolk slightly beaten, then add 1/2 cup oil gradually while beating constantly, and fold in 1 egg white, beaten stiff.
This is a "boiled" or cooked salad dressing, a once-standard alternative to true mayonnaise — but the eggs in it never reach a safe temperature, and the sequence of steps is what causes the problem.
- The eggs are added after cooking, not duringThe flour-and-vinegar base is cooked for 15 minutes in a double boiler, then cooled, and only then is the yolk stirred in. Nothing heats the yolk afterward, so it stays raw in a dressing that will be eaten cold.
- The stiff white is raw as wellA beaten egg white folded in at the end is uncooked and unheated. It also aerates the dressing, giving it a soft, foamy body.
- Salmonella risk in shell eggsRaw or lightly handled shell eggs remain a recognised vehicle for Salmonella enteritidis. A dressing of this kind held at room temperature is the situation food-safety guidance specifically warns about.
- The acid does not make it safeA quarter cup of vinegar diluted by half a cup of water, roughly five-eighths of a cup of oil and a flour paste cannot be relied on as a kill step. Acidity alone is not a substitute for heat.
- No holding or keeping instructionsThe original gives no yield, no refrigeration note and no use-by window, and it carries none of the controls a modern cook would need.
- If you want a cooked dressingUse a current recipe in which the eggs are cooked into the base and brought to temperature, or a pasteurised egg product. Do not attempt to patch the order of operations here.
Boiled or "cooked" dressings like this one filled a specific gap in early twentieth-century American cooking: real mayonnaise demanded a great deal of oil, a steady hand and constant beating, while a flour-thickened base stretched oil and a single egg into a bowlful of dressing that would coat cabbage, potato or chicken salad. Commercial jarred mayonnaise reached American grocers in the 1910s and spread through the 1920s, but home-made dressings of this kind persisted for decades in community and entertaining cookbooks, and the flour-thickened style survives in the sweet-sour "boiled dressing" still associated with Pennsylvania Dutch and Midwestern cole slaw.