Home › Introductory Recipes › Whipped Egg Fruit Dressing
Whipped Egg Fruit Dressing
To the white of one egg allow a tablespoon of olive oil. Whip first the egg, adding oil gradually as in mayonnaise. Flavour with lemon juice, salt, cayenne, etc., as for mayonnaise, or substitute pure fruit cordials or liqueurs; failing these use a pure fruit syrup, fresh or preserved.
A single-egg-white emulsion meant as a lighter alternative to mayonnaise on fruit salads. The construction is sound in principle, but it is built on uncooked egg and is never heated at any point.
- Why the cautionThe white is beaten raw and the dressing is served cold, so nothing in the process reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Shell eggs in many markets are not pasteurised, and an uncooked dressing offers any contamination a hospitable place to sit; the lemon juice or fruit syrup here is a flavouring, not a reliable acidification. Use a current dressing recipe built on pasteurised egg or a cooked base instead.
- Proportions are unusually leanOne tablespoon of oil to one white is a fraction of the oil a mayonnaise carries; the result is a foam lightly enriched with oil rather than a true thick emulsion. If you read this expecting mayonnaise consistency, you will think it has failed when it has not.
- "As in mayonnaise"The period shorthand means adding the oil drop by drop at the start, then in a thin thread once the mixture has taken, whisking continuously. Egg white lacks the lecithin-rich yolk, so it emulsifies far less willingly and depends mostly on the whipped foam for body.
- Cayenne in a fruit dressingNot an error. Cayenne turns up routinely in salad dressings of this period in the place we would give white pepper. The recipe gives no quantity; a very small amount is implied, enough to sharpen rather than to register as heat.
- Fruit cordialsIn British usage of this period a cordial is a sweetened fruit syrup or a sweet liqueur, not the diluted squash sold under the name today. The recipe leaves the choice open, adding only that a plain fruit syrup will do if none is to hand.
- YieldOne white and a tablespoon of oil is a very small quantity even once whipped, enough for a small salad rather than a table; and being a foam rather than a true emulsion it will not hold, so it wants making at the last moment.
Sweet and semi-sweet salads were a comparatively new idea in English-language cookery around the turn of the twentieth century, arriving with the vogue for the fruit salad as a light luncheon course, and cooks reached for the vocabulary they already had — mayonnaise, its method, its seasonings of lemon, salt and cayenne — then swapped the vinegar for a fruit syrup or liqueur. The egg-white variant, lighter and less rich than a yolk mayonnaise, belongs to the same family as the boiled and whipped-cream fruit dressings found in American cookbooks of the same decades. Its instructions assume a reader who already knows how to make mayonnaise by hand.