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Mayonnaise Dressing
3 egg yolks 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon mustard 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1/4 teaspoon powdered sugar 2 cups olive oil 2 tablespoons lemon juice 1 tablespoon vinegar Mix the dry ingredients, add the egg yolks, when well mixed add 1/2 teaspoon vinegar; beat with a Dover beater until smooth, then add, drop by drop, 2 cups of oil, beating constantly. As the mixture thickens thin with lemon juice, or vinegar; add more oil, alternating with the vinegar and lemon until the proportions are used, stirring or beating constantly. If oil is added too rapidly the dressing will curdle. In this case take a fresh, cold yolk, beat until thick and add the curdled mixture slowly to it. The oil, for salad dressing, should be thoroughly chilled and in making all utensils and ingredients should be cold. It is helpful to place the bowl in a larger dish of cracked ice.
Mayonnaise should be stiff enough to hold its shape. The size of the eggs and the sharpness of the vinegar are so variable that the sauce made with 2 cups of oil may vary at different times.
This is a classic hand-beaten mayonnaise, and the technique is sound, but the eggs are raw and stay raw. A few notes on what the original assumes, and on why this version should not be made from shell eggs today.
- Raw yolks, never heatedThree uncooked yolks are emulsified into oil and eaten as is; nothing in the method takes the eggs anywhere near the 160F at which Salmonella Enteritidis is reliably killed. The acid from 1 tablespoon vinegar plus 2 tablespoons lemon juice spread through 2 cups of oil is far too dilute and too slow-acting to be relied on as a kill step.
- Held cold, and that is the pointThe recipe deliberately keeps everything chilled and says nothing about storage or shelf life. A cold bowl slows bacterial growth but does not remove it, and the quantity is larger than one meal would need, though the book gives no keeping instructions either way. If you want mayonnaise, use a current recipe built on pasteurized eggs or pasteurized liquid yolk.
- Dover beaterA hand-cranked rotary egg beater; the Dover pattern derives from a patent of about 1870 and the type was widely sold in American kitchens by 1900. It worked faster than a hand whisk, which is why the instructions insist on constant beating.
- "Powdered sugar"In books of this period this usually means finely ground granulated sugar rather than the cornstarch-blended confectioners' sugar sold now. A quarter teaspoon in two cups of dressing is too little to sweeten noticeably.
- Olive oil of the eraImported salad oil of this period was often mild and was frequently blended or adulterated with cheaper oils; the intensely bitter, peppery extra-virgin oils common today would taste very different across two cups of dressing.
- The curdling rescueStarting a fresh cold yolk and dribbling the broken emulsion into it is still the correct fix for a split mayonnaise, and it is one of the more reliable pieces of kitchen advice in the book. It does not, of course, change the raw-egg problem.
- YieldTwo cups of oil plus yolks and acid gives roughly two and a half cups of finished dressing, considerably more than one meal's worth. The recipe itself notes that the result may vary batch to batch with egg size and vinegar strength.
Mayonnaise reached American cookbooks through French cuisine in the nineteenth century, and by the time this Gold Medal book appeared it had become the default dressing of the fashionable composed salad, spooned over lettuce hearts, cold chicken, lobster and moulded fruit. Its arrival in a flour company's promotional cookbook says a good deal about how such books worked: the miller gave away a general household manual to sell sacks of flour, so the salad chapter had to stand alongside the bread and cake chapters as complete instruction for a middle-class kitchen. The insistence on chilled oil, chilled bowl and cracked ice reflects a real difficulty of the period, since an emulsion beaten by hand in a warm kitchen breaks easily — a general fact about the technique rather than something the book itself explains. Commercial jarred mayonnaise is often said to have been appearing in American groceries around these same years, and in time instructions like these would become a specialist skill rather than an everyday one.