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Salad Dressing in Large Quantity
3 eggs 3 tablespoons flour 1½ cups cold water Red and black pepper Salt 1 teaspoon mustard 1/2 cup vinegar 3 egg yolks 1 cup olive oil Beat the three whole eggs; add the mustard and flour well mixed with the water and a little red and black pepper. Put the vinegar on to boil and while boiling add the egg and mustard mixture, stirring constantly until it thickens. When cold add a Mayonnaise made of the three egg yolks and olive oil. Add salt after all is finished.
This makes about a quart and is useful for chicken salad or for any purpose where a large quantity of dressing is needed. In winter it will keep a week or more.
This is two dressings in one: a cooked flour-and-egg base, cooled, then let down with a small batch of real mayonnaise. The result is a stable, pourable quart rather than a stiff spoonable mayonnaise.
- The hinge: temper, don't scramblePouring the raw egg-flour slurry into boiling vinegar will curdle it if you are not stirring hard from the moment it goes in. Work over medium heat with a whisk, or better, off the boil in a double boiler, and cook only until it coats the whisk — a minute or two past thickening.
- Red and black pepper"Red pepper" here means cayenne, not paprika or a fresh chile. A scant 1/8 teaspoon cayenne and 1/4 teaspoon black pepper suits a quart.
- MustardAlmost certainly dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard, though the recipe does not say. If using powder, sift it with the flour before adding the water or it will stay in lumps.
- Vinegar strengthHousehold vinegar of the period varied in strength and was far less standardized than today's 5 percent cider or white wine vinegar. Taste the cooked base once cool and cut with a spoonful of water if it bites.
- The mayonnaise halfThree yolks to one cup of oil is a normal ratio; add the oil in a thread at first, and use a mild olive oil or half olive and half neutral oil, since modern extra-virgin can turn bitter when emulsified at speed.
- Why salt lastThe recipe gives no reason for holding the salt to the end. Add it a half teaspoon at a time to the finished quart.
- Keeping itIgnore "in winter it will keep a week or more" — that assumes an unheated pantry and uncooked yolks stirred in cold. Refrigerate in a covered jar and use within three to four days; for raw-yolk mayonnaise, pasteurized eggs are the sensible choice.
- YieldAbout a quart, as stated.
Boiled or cooked dressing of this kind was the workhorse of American salad-making from the 1880s through the mid-twentieth century, in community and loose-leaf cookbooks alike. Flour and whole egg cooked with vinegar gave body without the expense of a full quart of olive oil, which was an imported luxury item in most of the United States. What is notable here is the compromise: the cook makes a small true mayonnaise and stirs it into the cheaper cooked base, buying the flavor of oil and egg yolk at a fraction of the cost. Recipes scaled to "large quantity" like this one were presumably meant for feeding a crowd, though the recipe itself says nothing about the occasion.