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Mayonnaise Cream Dressing
Add one half cup cream beaten until stiff to Mayonnaise Dressing No. 1.
A one-line recipe that assumes you have already made the book's Mayonnaise Dressing No. 1 — an egg-yolk-and-oil emulsion beaten by hand. Everything that can go wrong here happens in the folding.
- Fold, do not beatWhipped cream stirred vigorously into mayonnaise will deflate and can break the emulsion. Add the mayonnaise to the cream in two or three additions, folding with a spatula until just streak-free.
- What "cream" meantCream sold for whipping in this period varied considerably in butterfat and was not standardised as it is now; use modern heavy or whipping cream, ideally not ultra-pasteurized, which whips looser and weeps faster. The recipe says "beaten until stiff," though stopping short of grainy stiffness makes folding easier.
- QuantitiesHalf a cup of cream whips to about a cup. The yield depends entirely on the size of the base recipe, which this page does not state; if the book's Mayonnaise Dressing No. 1 makes about a cup, expect roughly two cups of finished dressing.
- Raw yolk in the baseThe underlying mayonnaise is never heated. If serving children, elderly guests or anyone immune-compromised, make the base with pasteurized eggs or pasteurized yolks.
- Make it lateThe cream will slacken and may begin to weep on standing. Fold it together shortly before serving and keep it refrigerated until it goes to the table.
- Where it belongsMild, and better suited to fruit salads, chicken or lobster salad, and moulded salads on lettuce than to anything wanting a sharp dressing. A little lemon juice sharpens it back up if the cream flattens the seasoning.
Cream-lightened mayonnaise appears all through American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, usually under names like "cream dressing," "Mayonnaise Chantilly" or, later, the dressing folded with cream and gelatine for moulded salads. Its rise tracks the arrival of the elaborate composed salad in middle-class American dining: fruit, nuts and cold poultry arranged on lettuce, for which straight mayonnaise was considered too heavy and too pungent. Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, as one of the promotional cookbooks food firms produced in quantity around the turn of the twentieth century; such books ran a full domestic curriculum — salads, soups, meats — around the sponsor's product, which is why a chocolate company's volume carries a salad chapter numbering its mayonnaises. The instruction to build one dressing out of another is typical of the genre's economy, where recipes are cross-referenced rather than repeated.