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Mayonnaise Dressing with Cream & Cayenne
1 T butter 1 t flour (heaping) 1/2 t salt 4 t sugar ¾ C vinegar 1 egg well beaten or (2 eggs) Mix all the dry ingredients together, add vinegar and cook until thick. Remove from fire, then add egg, well beaten. Can be thinned with milk, cream, or whipped cream, when cold. 3 eggs 1 C cream 1½ t mustard 1/2 C vinegar Dash cayenne Mrs. Robt. Sitz.
This is a boiled dressing rather than a true mayonnaise, and the text as printed is badly garbled — two versions of the recipe have run together and the list of "dry ingredients" is incomplete. Read it as a method rather than a formula.
- What the abbreviations meant is teaspoon and C is cup. "34 C vinegar" is almost certainly ¾ cup, mis-set in type; the second, larger version calls for ½ cup vinegar to 3 eggs and 1 cup cream.
- The missing ingredientsYou are told to "mix all the dry ingredients together," but only sugar and mustard survive in print. A dressing of this type normally takes flour or cornstarch (roughly a tablespoon per cup of liquid) plus salt to thicken and season; in the first version, where the egg goes in off the heat, some starch is needed for the vinegar to "cook until thick" at all.
- It contains no oilDespite the name, there is no oil and no emulsion here. Community and church books of this period often used "mayonnaise" loosely for any pale, tart, egg-thickened salad dressing.
- Cooking the eggThe original removes the pan from the fire before adding the beaten egg, which leaves the egg's temperature to chance. Whisk a little of the hot vinegar mixture into the eggs to temper them, return everything to low heat, and cook while stirring until it reaches 160F and coats a spoon.
- Do not let it boil after the egg goes inThis is the hinge. Above a simmer the egg proteins tighten and the dressing turns granular and weeping. Steady low heat and constant stirring, then straining if it does break slightly.
- ThinningThin only when fully cold, as the recipe says. Milk gives a pouring dressing; whipped cream folded in gives a softer, paler one.
- Yield and keepingThe one-egg version makes roughly a cup, the three-egg version closer to two. Keep it covered in the refrigerator and use within four or five days; the vinegar helps but this is still a cooked egg custard.
Boiled dressing of this kind was a common American salad sauce well into the twentieth century, and it persisted in church and community cookbooks after commercial mayonnaise had reached grocery shelves. Oil was costly and hand-beaten emulsions laborious and prone to failure, so cooks often thickened vinegar with egg, flour and a little sugar instead — sweet, sharp and comparatively stable. The attribution to Mrs. Robt. Sitz is typical of the genre, where recipes travelled under the name of the woman who contributed them.