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Lettuce Dressing (Raw egg tablespoonful sugar)
1 raw egg. 1 tablespoonful sugar. 1 teaspoonful salt. 1/2 teaspoonful mustard. A little cayenne pepper (never use black pepper on lettuce). 2 tablespoonfuls best olive oil. 1 tablespoonful vinegar. --Miss R. S.
A plain uncooked salad dressing of the sort that stood between the oil-and-vinegar school and the fully emulsified mayonnaise. The problem is the egg: nothing here ever reaches a temperature that would make it safe.
- The raw egg is the whole difficultyOne whole egg is beaten in and served immediately, with no heating and no acid strong enough or long enough in contact to matter. Salmonella in shell eggs is an internal contamination risk, not just a shell-surface one, so washing or picking a clean egg does nothing. An 1879 household might well have had eggs of known and recent origin; that assumption cannot be made behind a supermarket carton.
- Who is most at riskUncooked-egg dressings are specifically discouraged for children, pregnant women, older adults and anyone immunocompromised. A dressing is served cold, in quantity, and often sits out on a table, which compounds the problem rather than easing it.
- What to do insteadIf you want a lettuce dressing of this character, use a current recipe written with egg safety in mind. This one should be read rather than made.
- The proportions are the interesting partTwo parts oil to one part vinegar is unusually sharp by modern standards, where three or four to one is normal. Nineteenth-century vinegars were less standardised than today's five-percent product, which may account for some of the difference; the recipe does not say what vinegar was meant.
- "Best olive oil"In Virginia in 1879 this meant imported oil, and an expensive item; rancidity was a recognised hazard of oil that had travelled and sat. The instruction is about freshness and quality as much as grade; it does not map onto the modern extra-virgin/refined distinction.
- Mustard here is powderMustard here is probably powder -- A half teaspoonful of mustard in a book of this date most likely means dry mustard flour rather than prepared jarred mustard. Dry mustard also has some emulsifying effect, helping the oil and vinegar hold with the egg.
- The cayenne ruleThe parenthesis is not decoration, though the writer gives no reason for it. Black pepper may have been thought coarse on delicate lettuce; cayenne disperses into the dressing without visible specks. Cayenne turns up routinely in American salad dressings of this period.
- YieldThe ingredients add up to somewhat under half a cup. It will not keep.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathered contributions from some 250 Virginia housekeepers, and the terse "--Miss R. S." attribution is typical of how the book credited them: recognisable within a community, anonymous outside it. The older Anglo-American habit was a hard-boiled yolk mashed with oil, vinegar and mustard; the newer French fashion was mayonnaise, whipped from raw yolks and a great deal more oil. This recipe might be read as a compromise, using a whole raw egg for body without the labour of a true emulsion, and it keeps the sugar.