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Mayonnaise Dressing
All materials should be thoroughly chilled before being used in the making of mayonnaise. 2 raw egg-yolks 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper 1/4 teaspoon paprika 1/8 teaspoon mustard 3 tablespoons vinegar or lemon-juice 2 cups olive oil or substitute To the yolks add the seasonings, beat thoroughly, add the vinegar, or lemon-juice, and beat again. Add the oil gradually (drop by drop at first). The mixture should be thick and creamy. Should the mayonnaise curdle, begin with a third egg-yolk, add a small quantity of oil to the egg, and then by very small quantities, add the curdled dressing. At times a dressing may be quite firm when left, only to be found curdled and disappointing when the time comes to use it. This third-egg process will, however, usually restore it. Equal proportions of vinegar and lemon-juice may be used. Tarragon vinegar is sometimes used instead of the ordinary kind.
A standard hand-beaten mayonnaise of the 1920s, built on two cups of oil and never heated at any stage. The technique notes are sound; the eggs are the problem.
- Why the cautionThe yolks are eaten raw and are never brought to any temperature that would kill Salmonella, and the finished dressing then sits at room temperature or in a home refrigerator for days. When this book was written the risk was not understood; today an uncooked-yolk emulsion made from ordinary shell eggs is not something we can recommend making. Use a current mayonnaise recipe.
- The acid does not make it safeThe acid is not a reliable safeguard -- Three tablespoons of vinegar or lemon juice against two cups of oil and two yolks is a low acid concentration by weight. Acid does reduce bacterial survival in a yolk emulsion over time, but at this proportion it cannot be relied on to make raw yolks safe; here it is chiefly for flavour and for emulsion stability.
- "Olive oil or substitute"The substitute in this period would usually have been cottonseed or corn oil, sold as "salad oil". Any neutral oil behaves much the same in the emulsion, and olive oil alone can taste aggressive at this ratio.
- Chilling everythingThe opening line is the hinge of the method as the book presents it: cold ingredients are less prone to break, which matters when the whole two cups go in by drops and by hand. Modern practice is far less insistent on this. The recipe does not say what to beat with.
- The third-yolk rescueThis is still the standard repair for a broken emulsion: start clean with fresh yolk, work in a little oil, then beat the split mixture back in a spoonful at a time. Note that it adds a third raw yolk to the batch.
- YieldTwo cups of oil plus the yolks and acid produce roughly two and a half cups of finished dressing, a quantity that assumes a household salad bowl and frequent use rather than a modern jar in the door of the refrigerator.
- Tarragon vinegarWhite wine vinegar steeped with fresh tarragon. The recipe offers it as an occasional variation; it is often associated with mayonnaise for chicken or fish.
Mayonnaise is generally traced to Mahón in Menorca, and the story of a French commander's cook improvising an oil-and-egg sauce there in 1756 is repeated everywhere but documented nowhere; the name may equally derive from the old French moyeu, meaning egg yolk. By the time The New Delineator Recipes appeared in 1930, mayonnaise was firmly established as an American salad dressing, and a magazine kitchen would treat it as a basic competence rather than a luxury. Commercial jarred mayonnaise was already on grocery shelves by then, but many home cooks still made their own by hand, which is why so much of this entry is given over to what to do when the emulsion breaks. The advice to chill the ingredients reflects kitchens where the alternative was a warm room and a bowl of oil that would separate before dinner.