Home › Pickles-Relishes › Economical Mayonnaise
Economical Mayonnaise
Luella Ray.
Part One 1/3 C flour 2 t salt 1 C cold water Cook in double boiler 15 minutes Part Two 2 egg yolks 1 C salad oil 2 T vinegar Put in large bowl. Pour Part One into Part Two and beat until 2 T lemon juice 1 level t mustard thick.
Mrs. Chas. H. Kaiser.
The typesetting has run the two ingredient columns together: Part Two is 2 egg yolks, 1 cup salad oil, 2 tablespoons vinegar, 2 tablespoons lemon juice and 1 level teaspoon mustard, and the instruction is simply to pour Part One into Part Two and beat until thick. Everything else is straightforward, but a few details decide whether it emulsifies or splits.
- Cool the paste firstThe flour-and-water paste comes out of the double boiler near boiling. Poured straight onto two yolks it will scramble them in streaks. Let it cool to just warm, or beat the yolks with the acid first and add the paste in a thin stream while whisking hard.
- What the flour is doingThis is a starch-stabilised dressing, not a true emulsion held by yolk alone. The gelatinised flour paste carries the oil, which is how a single cup of oil yields well over two cups of finished dressing.
- Fifteen minutes in the double boilerLong enough for the raw-flour taste to cook out. The paste should be thick, glossy and smooth, closer to wallpaper paste than gravy. Whisk it once or twice during cooking so it does not set in lumps against the bowl.
- Salad oilIn American usage of this period this meant a mild oil for dressings: often olive oil, though refined cottonseed and later corn oils were also sold under the name. Use a mild vegetable, canola or light olive oil; extra-virgin olive can turn bitter when beaten hard.
- The salt is highTwo teaspoons for this volume reads as strongly seasoned to modern palates. Start with one teaspoon and adjust at the end.
- Mustard"1 level t mustard" means dry mustard powder, which also helps the emulsion hold. Prepared mustard will work but adds more vinegar and water.
- Raw yolksThe yolks are never brought to a safe temperature; the warm paste does not pasteurise them. Use pasteurised eggs if serving to children, the elderly, pregnant women or anyone immunocompromised.
- Yield and keepingAbout 2 1/2 cups. Refrigerate in a covered jar and use within three or four days; the starch will weep and stiffen after that, and a brief whisk revives it only so far.
Flour-thickened salad dressings were the standard economy in American home kitchens before bottled mayonnaise became cheap, and church and lodge cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s are full of them under names like boiled dressing, cooked dressing and, as here, "economical mayonnaise." The economy is in the oil: a cup of salad oil was a real expense, and a starch paste let it stretch while producing something that spread on cold chicken or bound a potato salad. Two contributors' names are attached to a single card, Luella Ray above and Mrs. Chas. H. Kaiser below. The commercial alternative was arriving at just this period, with jarred mayonnaise sold in American delicatessens from the 1910s onward, but in a kitchen like this one the double boiler was still the cheaper route.