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Mayonnaise Dressing
a One egg yolk, one cup of olive oil, one and one-half teaspoons of salt, one-quarter teaspoon of cayenne, one and one-half teaspoons of mustard, one tablespoon of lemon juice, one tablespoon of vinegar Mix in a cold bowl mustard, salt, pepper, yolk of egg and lemon juice, stir well, then add oil drop by drop; as mixture thickens thin with vinegar, keep in cold place until ready to serve. If a thinner dressing is liked, add one-half cup of beaten cream to the above mixture. If dressing is to be kept for any length of time use the yolk of a hard-boiled egg in addition to the raw yolk.
This is a standard hand-beaten mayonnaise of the period, and the problem is not the technique but the egg and the keeping instructions.
- Raw yolk, never heatedThe single raw yolk is the whole structure of the sauce and is never brought anywhere near a temperature that would kill Salmonella. Eggs of the period were often more locally sourced and used sooner, though practice varied; a shell egg bought today has travelled and been stored, and shell eggs remain a recognised source of salmonellosis. Use a current recipe built on pasteurised egg.
- The keeping instruction is the worst of itThe note about adding a hard-boiled yolk "if dressing is to be kept for any length of time" suggests more than a few hours, and "a cold place" at this date would likely have meant a larder or an icebox rather than modern refrigeration. A cooked yolk stabilises the emulsion; it does nothing about the raw one.
- Acid is not a safeguard hereOne tablespoon each of lemon juice and vinegar against a cup of oil leaves the finished sauce well above the pH at which acidity meaningfully suppresses bacterial growth. Old sources sometimes treat vinegar as a preservative in dressings; in a mayonnaise this dilute it is a flavouring.
- The cream variationThe optional half cup of beaten cream adds unheated dairy to an unheated egg sauce and shortens its safe life further.
- What the ingredients mean"Mustard" here is dry mustard powder, not prepared mustard, and it acts as an emulsifier as much as a seasoning. "Pepper" in the method refers back to the quarter teaspoon of cayenne listed above; there is no black pepper in the recipe.
- Proportions, for referenceOne yolk to a full cup of oil is a generous but conventional ratio, which is why the oil goes in drop by drop and the vinegar is used to slacken it. The yield is roughly a cup and a quarter.
Mayonnaise reached American household books in the second half of the nineteenth century as a French import, and by the time Good Housekeeping printed this it had become the default dressing for the composed meat, fish and vegetable salads that fill this chapter -- chicken salad, lobster salad, salmon salad, all of them bound with it. The name is generally traced to Mahón, the port on Minorca, and linked by tradition to the French capture of the island in 1756, though the derivation from moyeu, an old French word for egg yolk, also has its supporters and neither is settled. Until the arrival of commercial jarred mayonnaise in the 1910s and 1920s, cooks generally made it by hand in a cold bowl with a fork or a whisk, and the drop-by-drop discipline described here was the whole of the skill.