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White Mayonnaise Without Oil
Put the yolks of 2 raw eggs, 1 tablespoonful of butter, a dash of cayenne, and 1/4 teaspoonful of salt in a saucepan and stand in another pan partly filled with hot water over the fire. Stir continuously, and when it begins to thicken draw to one side and add by degrees 2 more tablespoonfuls of butter. When all have been incorporated and the mixture is thick and smooth, take off and strain into a bowl. When ready to use stir in 4 tablespoonfuls of very thick whipped cream.
This is a hollandaise in all but name, lightened with whipped cream and offered as a mayonnaise substitute for cooks who could not spare the oil. The whole thing succeeds or fails on gentle heat.
- The hinge: keep the water below a simmerThe yolks must thicken, not scramble. Keep the outer pan at a bare shiver, stir without stopping, and pull the inner pan off the heat the moment the mixture coats the spoon. If it looks grainy, it has gone too far, and straining will only disguise it.
- Temperature targetYolk proteins begin to set somewhere around 150F and are firmly set by the mid-160s; much above that they tighten and curdle. Bringing the mixture to about 160F and holding it there briefly also addresses the egg-safety question the original never considered.
- Butter, in three stagesRoughly 1 tablespoon to start and 2 more added after thickening, about 1 1/2 oz / 45 g total. Add the later butter in small pieces off direct heat so it emulsifies rather than melts into an oily layer.
- "Over the fire" and "draw to one side"These are range-top instructions from a coal or wood stove, where moving a pan sideways meant less heat rather than none. On a modern hob, lift the pan clear or turn the burner to its lowest setting.
- Strain, and mean itPushing the sauce through a fine sieve catches chalazae and any set specks of yolk. It is the difference between a smooth sauce and one that reads as broken.
- The cream goes in cold and lastWhip 4 tablespoons of heavy cream to soft-to-firm peaks and fold it into the sauce only when the sauce has cooled to just warm or room temperature. Hot sauce will deflate the cream and the dressing will thin out.
- CayenneA "dash" here is a pinch, perhaps 1/16 teaspoon. It is meant as background warmth, not heat, and there is no acid in the recipe at all; a teaspoon of lemon juice stirred in at the end brings it closer to what a modern palate expects from mayonnaise.
- Yield and keepingRoughly half to three-quarters of a cup, depending on whether the 4 tablespoons of cream are measured before or after whipping. It will not hold like oil mayonnaise: make it the same day, refrigerate anything not used at once, and do not attempt to reheat it.
Recipes titled "without oil" cluster in economical American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period in which good imported olive oil was a relatively costly item in many households, even as domestic cottonseed oil was cheap and widely available, while butter, eggs and cream came from the farm or the milkman. The result is not really mayonnaise in the French sense — a cold emulsion of raw yolk and oil — but a warm-made butter sauce of the hollandaise family, cooled and slackened with whipped cream. That cream finish invites comparison with the boiled and cooked dressings that dominated American salad-making of the period, and it is sometimes suggested, though not firmly documented, that the line runs on into commercial salad dressing later in the century. The double-boiler method it relies on, a pan standing in another pan of hot water, is often said to have been a domestic answer to a stove whose heat could not be turned down.