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Salad Dressings
Take the yolk of one raw egg; add to that one-half table spoonful of either dry or thickly mixed mustard, salt and pep per to your taste. When well mixed together, add sweet oil in very small quantities, at a time, stirring briskly until it is very thick. Then add a little vinegar, but not sufficient to make the dressing thin. These are the proportions for the yolk of one raw egg, sufficient for four people. The quantity of eggs, mustard, etc., must be increased in proportion to the quantity of dressing needed.--Mrs. McK.
This is hand-beaten mayonnaise, given in the loose 19th-century manner with no fixed quantity of oil or acid. A few of its terms have shifted, and the raw yolk is a real problem.
- Raw yolk, never heatedThe dressing is built on an uncooked egg yolk and eaten as is. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella on the shell and, less often, inside the yolk, and nothing in this method brings the egg anywhere near a temperature that would kill it. Use a current recipe for uncooked egg dressings instead.
- The acid is unmeasuredCommercial and modern home mayonnaise rely on a specified amount of vinegar or lemon juice to bring the pH low enough to suppress bacterial growth. Here the instruction is "a little vinegar, but not sufficient to make the dressing thin" y by eye, which gives no assurance of acidification at all.
- No holding guidanceThe recipe says nothing about refrigeration or how long the dressing may stand. An unacidified raw-yolk emulsion left at room temperature is a poor keeper.
- Sweet oil"Sweet oil" means olive oil, that is, oil that is fresh rather than rancid, not oil that tastes sweet. Nineteenth-century American cooks could buy it from the druggist as well as the grocer.
- Thickly mixed mustard"Thickly mixed" mustard is mustard powder worked to a stiff paste with a little water and left to stand; it is not the pourable prepared mustard of a squeeze bottle. Dry mustard also acts as an emulsifier here, not only as seasoning.
- Half a tablespoonfulIf the book's tablespoon is near the modern 15 ml measure, the mustard works out to roughly one and a half teaspoons per yolk, more assertive than most present-day mayonnaise.
- YieldThe author gives one yolk as "sufficient for four people" -- a slick coating for greens, not a bowlful of dip.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives, is typical of the community cookbook form: each receipt carries its donor's initials, and the same dish may appear three or four times in slightly different hands. This one is mayonnaise -- an emulsion of egg yolk and oil that French cookery had formalized by the early nineteenth century and that reached American tables largely as a dressing for lettuce, chicken and cold fish. Making it by hand with a fork or wooden spoon, adding oil "in very small quantities at a time," was slow, unglamorous work. Bottled commercial mayonnaise was still decades away in the United States.