Home › Recipes › Mayonnaise Dressing
Mayonnaise Dressing
1 egg yolk 1 teaspoon flour 1 cup salad oil 4 tablespoons lemon juice 1 teaspoon salt Put the egg yolk into a bowl. Beat it with an egg beater till it begins to thicken, then stir the flour into it. Add a drop or two of oil and beat it in, then add a drop or two more and beat it in. Continue beating in the oil in this way, adding a few more drops at a time after the first few additions of oil. When the mixture becomes too thick to beat, thin it with lemon juice, then beat in oil again. Continue in this way till all the oil is used. Use enough lemon juice to make the dressing of the desired consistency. Lastly beat in the salt.
If the oil fails to unite with the egg, it will be necessary to begin over again, putting another egg yolk into a clean bowl and beating the oil-and-egg mixture which failed to unite, drop by drop, into the new egg yolk. This dressing will keep two weeks or more if kept in a cool place.
A hand-beaten emulsion of the classic domestic-science type, with one instruction at the end that puts it outside modern practice.
- Why the cautionThe yolk is never heated at any point, and the recipe directs that the finished dressing be kept two weeks or more in a "cool place" — a larder or cellar, not refrigeration. Raw shell egg held that long at cellar temperature is a documented Salmonella risk, and the acid here is not sufficient or reliably distributed enough to control it. Use a current mayonnaise recipe with current storage guidance.
- The hinge is drop-by-dropThe emulsion depends entirely on the oil entering in droplets small enough for the yolk's lecithin to coat before they can coalesce. Rushing the first tablespoon is what breaks mayonnaise; once a stable base has formed the oil can go in faster.
- The flourA teaspoon of raw flour appears in some recipes of this period; starch granules can help hold a shaky emulsion together and mask separation. It may contribute a faint pasty taste, and flour is not usual in later mayonnaise recipes.
- Salad oilIn American books of this general period "salad oil" means a bland refined oil; cottonseed and olive were both sold under the name. It does not mean the sort of assertive extra-virgin olive oil sold today, which would beat up bitter.
- Lemon juice as a thinner, not a flavouringThe four tablespoons are treated as a variable — the instruction is to use "enough to make the dressing of the desired consistency." A full four tablespoons to one cup of oil gives a notably sharp, loose dressing.
- Salt lastSalt is sometimes said to draw water from the yolk and make the initial emulsion harder to start, which may be why it is beaten in at the end; the recipe itself gives no reason.
- YieldAbout a cup and a quarter, roughly ten to twelve servings as a salad dressing.