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Dressing for Salad
Turkey is more economical and better for salad than chicken To one turkey, weighing about nine pounds, allow nine eggs: 7 hard-boiled eggs. 2 raw eggs, yolks and whites beaten separately. To each egg allow 2 tablespoonfuls salad oil, perfectly pure and sweet. 1 saltspoonful salt. 1 saltspoonful made mustard. 2 saltspoonfuls cayenne pepper to the whole amount. Celery to the taste. Lettuce leaves, if in season, using only the heart. The juice of 2 lemons.
This will last a week.--Mrs. A. M. D.
This is a mayonnaise-type dressing built on hard-boiled and raw egg, scaled to a whole nine-pound turkey. The proportions are workable, but the food-safety assumptions behind it are not, and the last line is the problem.
- Raw egg, never cookedTwo whole raw eggs go into the dressing and nothing in the method brings them to a safe temperature. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella internally, and in 1878 that risk was neither understood nor controlled at the farm.
- "This will last a week"A raw-egg emulsion held for a week, in a period without reliable refrigeration, is the specific failure here. The lemon juice acidifies the dressing somewhat but there is no measured acidity, no salt cure and no temperature control, so nothing checks bacterial growth over that span.
- Hard-boiled yolks are not a safeguardSeven cooked eggs to two raw ones dilutes but does not eliminate the hazard, and cooked egg worked into an unchilled dressing is itself a hospitable medium for bacteria.
- Turkey salad compounds itThe dressing is proportioned to a bird of about nine pounds, so a large quantity of cooked poultry and celery is involved. Cooked poultry held in the danger zone is a classic vehicle for Staphylococcus aureus and Clostridium perfringens, and the volume alone makes safe cooling difficult.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the whole batch carries about half a teaspoon of cayenne and roughly two and a quarter teaspoons each of salt and made mustard. "Made mustard" means prepared mustard, not dry powder.
- Oil"Salad oil, perfectly pure and sweet" meant a neutral, unrancid oil, usually olive at the better end. Eighteen tablespoons is a little over a cup, which is a plausible ratio for the egg count.
- What to do insteadIf you want turkey salad with a classic egg dressing, use a current recipe built on pasteurised eggs or commercial mayonnaise, and treat it as a two-to-three-day refrigerated dish rather than a week's standby.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, was credited on its title page to some 250 lady contributors from Virginia and neighbouring states, which is why so many entries close with initials like Mrs. A. M. D. rather than a full name. The recipe belongs to the long American tradition of the cold "made salad" of poultry bound with an egg dressing, the ancestor of the church-supper chicken salad, and the opening claim that turkey is cheaper and better than chicken reflects a period when a bird was raised, killed and used to its last shred. It also sits at an interesting point in the history of mayonnaise, which is generally traced to French cookery of the previous century but which nineteenth-century American books often thickened, as here, with hard-boiled yolks rather than relying on raw yolks and oil alone.