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Simple Mayonnaise
To the yolk of one egg allow about one cup of olive oil and three tablespoons of lemon juice or strong, pure vinegar. To the yolk of the egg add one saltspoon of salt and a dash of cayenne pepper or Tabasco, and a teaspoon of either prepared mustard or Worcestershire Sauce. (These may of course be omitted if preferred). Add a few drops of oil to the whipped yolk and beat well with silver fork, adding more oil, little by little, alternating with the acid until the dressing is quite stiff and glossy. Keep ice-cold until used. Also, this may be frozen (in glass) by burying it in ice and salt for two hours. (Real olive oil congeals at higher temperature than other oils. If the oil is merely labelled "olive oil" it will not freeze so quickly.)
A classic hand-beaten mayonnaise, and a useful window into pre-blender emulsion work — but it depends on a raw egg yolk that is never heated at any point.
- Why the cautionThe yolk is eaten raw and the finished dressing is only chilled, never brought to a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Shell eggs then came from a different supply chain and the risk was neither understood nor controlled; today a raw-yolk sauce held at table temperature is a recognised vehicle for infection. If you want mayonnaise, use a current recipe built on pasteurised egg or pasteurised liquid yolk.
- Acid does not make it safeThree tablespoons of lemon juice or vinegar to a cup of oil sounds sharp, but most of the volume is oil, and what acid there is has to work against the buffering of the yolk, so the pH drop is slow and uneven. Acidification is only protective under measured conditions this recipe does not provide.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon — the smallest spoon in a Victorian cruet set, sold specifically for salt cellars.
- Silver forkNot affectation. The period objection was that iron and worn plated forks could taint an acid emulsion and discolour it, and silver was thought not to. A whisk or a bowl-and-spoon does the same job now, and stainless steel is fine.
- "Real olive oil"The closing note is a period authenticity test: genuine olive oil, high in oleic acid, clouds and solidifies at refrigerator temperatures, while adulterated oil cut with cottonseed or peanut oil stays liquid longer. Olive oil labelling was largely unpolicied when this was written.
- Freezing in ice and saltBurying a sealed glass jar in ice and coarse salt for two hours gives a brine bath well below 32F — the same rig as a hand-cranked ice cream freezer. It was how a cook produced a frozen dressing for a fruit salad before mechanical refrigeration.
- YieldOne yolk and a cup of oil make about a cup and a quarter of finished dressing.
Mayonnaise reached American cookbooks through French practice in the nineteenth century and, by the time fruit-salad cookery became fashionable around 1900, was widely used as a dressing for dishes served on a lettuce leaf. Its presence in a fruit book is telling: the era's fruit salads — pineapple, grapefruit, banana, cherries — were often dressed with mayonnaise or a sweetened variant of it, sometimes lightened with whipped cream, rather than eaten plain. The instruction to add oil a few drops at a time is the whole technique, and part of why mayonnaise was said to be a test of a cook before mechanical mixers existed; the frozen version, set in ice and salt, was a genteel flourish for summer luncheons. The suspicion voiced about oil merely "labelled olive oil" reflects a real and widely reported problem of the period, before federal food-labelling enforcement.