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How to Make Mayonnaise in Quantity
If four quarts or more of dressing be required, make the full amount at one time; cut down the number of yolks to one for each pint of oil, but keep the usual proportions of the other ingredients. Use a Dover egg-beater from the start; after a little a teaspoonful of oil can be added instead of drops, and, very soon, a much larger quantity.
This is a scaling note rather than a full formula — it assumes you already have a mayonnaise recipe and want a gallon of it. The arithmetic is the interesting part, and it is close to the limit of what a yolk can do.
- The hinge: one yolk per pint is leanA single yolk will emulsify about a cup of oil comfortably and two cups only if the oil goes in very slowly and the mixture is kept thick. At this ratio the emulsion is fragile from the start; err toward slower addition rather than faster, whatever the original says about speeding up.
- Dover egg-beaterA hand-cranked rotary beater, the standard American mixing tool from the 1870s onward. A stand mixer with the whisk, or a food processor, does the same job; an immersion blender is faster still but wants a narrow vessel, which works against a four-quart batch.
- Scale in real numbersFour quarts of dressing is roughly a gallon, which means about seven pints of oil and seven yolks once the vinegar and seasoning are accounted for. Use a bowl at least twice the finished volume — the mixture climbs as it thickens.
- "Usual proportions of the other ingredients"The recipe does not say what these are; in cookbooks of this period they are typically salt, dry mustard, a little cayenne or paprika, and lemon juice or vinegar added in stages. Whatever the reasoning, holding the acid and seasoning at full strength while cutting the yolks does no harm: acid helps the emulsion hold, and a large batch otherwise tastes flat.
- Everything at one temperatureA large batch behaves more predictably if the oil and yolks are at the same temperature rather than one cold and one warm, though adding oil too fast remains the usual reason a batch breaks. Work at cool room temperature and keep the bowl out of a draught.
- If it breaksStart a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the split mixture into it a spoonful at a time. At gallon scale this is a long job, which is the argument for adding the first pint of oil far more cautiously than the recipe implies.
- Eggs and keepingThe yolks are never heated. Use pasteurized eggs if the dressing will be served to anyone vulnerable, refrigerate immediately, and treat a batch this size as a few days' worth rather than a week's — nineteenth-century kitchens had cold larders and turnover that most households no longer do.
- YieldA gallon is roughly 128 fluid ounces, enough to dress salad for a very large gathering. For a modern household, drop the scale entirely and use one yolk to a cup of oil, which is more forgiving than the recipe's one yolk per pint.
Cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s treat mayonnaise as a test of a cook's patience: the oil went in drop by drop, by hand, and a broken batch was a real loss of expensive salad oil. Notes like this one belong to the catering side of the household manual — the church supper, the wedding breakfast, the summer hotel — where salads had become fashionable enough to need dressing by the gallon. The Dover beater, patented in the United States in the 1870s and by then the near-universal rotary hand beater, is what made the scale thinkable at all; it is mentioned here the way a later book would name a specific mixer. Cutting the yolks as the batch grows reflects something cooks knew empirically long before emulsion chemistry explained it: the lecithin in a yolk goes a good deal further than a small-batch recipe suggests, provided the oil is introduced slowly enough.