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Russian Dressing
Put the yolk of one egg in cold bowl and beat with silver fork until light, then add one cup Pompeian The wholesomeness of a home-made mayonnaise is never equalled in a factory-made mayonnaise.
Olive Oil, drop by drop at first, and as the mixture thickens, oil may be added more rapidly. Mix one level teaspoonful of dry mustard, one half teaspoonful of salt, one eighth teaspoonful of white or a pinch of red pepper, and one teaspoonful of vinegar or lemon juice together until smooth; then add it to the egg and oil. If it is too thick, add a little more vinegar or lemon juice.
Two tablespoonfuls of tomato catsup or Chili sauce are added last. One tablespoonful of finely-cut chives adds much to this dressing.
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This is a hand-beaten mayonnaise built on a single raw yolk, with catsup stirred in at the end. The text is worth reading for its technique and its period voice, but the dressing itself is uncooked egg held at room temperature and should not be made from these directions.
- Raw yolk, never heatedThe yolk is beaten cold and never brought to any temperature at all; the only acid is a teaspoonful of vinegar or lemon juice against a cup of oil, far too little to be relied on for anything. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella internally, and a dressing like this may well be made ahead and left standing. A current mayonnaise recipe should be used instead.
- The acid arrives late and thinNote the order: all the oil goes in before any vinegar. For most of the mixing time the emulsion is essentially plain yolk and oil, with no acidity at all.
- The advertisement in the middle of the sentence"The wholesomeness of a home-made mayonnaise is never equalled in a factory-made mayonnaise" is not an instruction. It is a display line from the oil company that published the book, which has ended up inside the recipe text. Read past it and the sentence runs "add one cup Pompeian Olive Oil, drop by drop at first."
- Why a silver forkThe usual explanation is that plain steel of the period pitted and darkened on contact with egg and vinegar, greying the dressing. Modern stainless steel, glass and ceramic are all inert, and the instruction carries little meaning now.
- Pepper measuresAn eighth teaspoonful of white pepper and "a pinch of red" are given as alternatives, not additions. Red pepper here means cayenne, not paprika or crushed chilli flakes.
- What makes it RussianThe base is a plain mayonnaise; the catsup or chilli sauce added last is the whole of the transformation. Chilli sauce in this era means a thick sweet-sour tomato relish, closer to catsup than to any hot sauce.
- YieldOne yolk and one cup of oil gives roughly a cup and a quarter of finished dressing, enough for a large salad for six.
This comes from a promotional booklet issued by an olive oil importer, a form of cookbook that flourished in the United States in the early twentieth century. The house style is visible throughout: the oil is named in full every time it appears, and sales copy about the virtues of home-made mayonnaise has been set directly into the body of the instructions. Russian dressing itself is generally traced to American kitchens in the years around 1910, and despite the name has no established Russian origin; the usual explanation offered at the time was that early versions contained caviar, though the recipes that survive rarely do. What defines it in print from this period is exactly what is described here, a mayonnaise reddened and sweetened with tomato catsup or chilli sauce, sometimes with chives or chopped pimiento. The later habit of building it on chopped pickle and relish belongs to the mid-century, by which point Russian and Thousand Island dressings had largely collapsed into one another on the American table.