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Uncooked Salad Dressing (Pt Mazola oil Juice lemon or T)
½ pt. Mazola oil Juice 1 lemon or 2 T vinegar 2 T sugar ½ t salt Mustard as desired Beat egg two minutes; add oil two tablespoonfuls at time, beating after each addition. Add lemon juice (or vinegar) and sugar, salt and mustard.
This is a hand-beaten mayonnaise, and its only binder is a raw egg that is never heated at any point. That is the reason it cannot be recommended as written; the rest of the notes are for reading the recipe rather than making it.
- The raw egg is the problemThe egg is beaten, dressed with acid and oil, and eaten. Nothing in the method reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and lemon juice or vinegar at this dilution does not reliably do so either. Refrigeration cannot be assumed for a dressing of this kind.
- The egg is not even in the ingredient listNote that the quantity list gives oil, acid, sugar, salt and mustard, and the egg appears only in the method; omissions of this sort are common in community cookbooks. There is no way to know from the page whether the contributor meant one whole egg or one yolk, which changes both the texture and the volume of oil the emulsion will carry.
- If you want mayonnaiseUse a current recipe built on pasteurized eggs or a cooked base. This one should be read, not made.
- "12 t salt"A transcription artifact. The original card almost certainly read ½ t; twelve teaspoons of salt in a cup of oil would be inedible.
- Half a pint of oilOne cup. Beaten by hand into a single egg, two tablespoons at a time, that is about as much oil as one egg will comfortably carry.
- MazolaThen as now a corn oil, and among the widely advertised brand-name bottled salad oils in American home kitchens. Contributors of this period often named the brand rather than writing "salad oil."
- "Mustard as desired"Most likely dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard, though the page does not say. Besides flavor, mustard acts as a secondary emulsifier.
- YieldRoughly a cup and a half.
"Uncooked" is the operative word in the title: through much of the nineteenth century a homemade salad dressing often meant a boiled dressing, thickened with egg and flour over hot water and often stretched with milk, because emulsifying a full cup of oil into an egg by hand was tedious and prone to failure — though mayonnaise-type dressings appear in nineteenth-century American cookbooks alongside the boiled ones. Cheap bottled seed oils — Mazola corn oil among the earliest and most heavily advertised — made the uncooked, mayonnaise-style dressing practical in an ordinary kitchen, and recipes like this one spread through church and club cookbooks as the newer, more fashionable option. The instruction to add the oil two tablespoons at a time is the tell: the emulsion had to be coaxed, and the recipe says only "beat."