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Mayonaise Salad Dressing
"Three times the spoon with oil of Lucca crown, And once with vinegar procured from town." 3 or 4 raw yolks of eggs. 1 teacupful of olive oil. About half as much vinegar. A teaspoonful of salt.
Drop the yolks into a bowl, soup plate, or deep, bright saucepan, add about as much oil and stir them together with a wooden spoon--or any other kind of a spoon--for a minute or two, then commence beating and add oil a tablespoonful at a time. After five minutes stirring and beating, the oil being more than half in, throw in the salt and begin adding the vinigar also by spoonfuls. On the addition of the salt the mayonaise will be very likely to thicken up at once and the vinegar is required to reduce it, as well as for flavor. The above is the way of making plain, straight-forward mayonaise that is practiced by cooks and their assistants daily all over the country, and being such a very simple operation there is no wonder if they do not see the reason for making so much ado about it. It takes ten or fifteen minutes to bring it to the proper consistence. There might be difficulty if the ingredients were warm; as a matter of habit cooks always keep the oil in a cold place. In hot weather set the bowl in ice water. Mayonaise of the required thickness cannot probably be made with a smaller proportion of oil, but the same yolks will take up much more if need be.
A quicker way than the foregoing is: Place the yolks in a deep quart bowl--set in ice water, if warm weather--add a spoonful of oil and whip with a Dover egg beater. In half a minute add more oil, then the salt, and the mixture will at once become like butter. Keep thinning with oil and vinegar as in the other case, three proportions of oil to one of vinegar.
This is a classic hand-built mayonnaise, and the method is sound as an account of how emulsions were made in a professional bake shop. It is also built on three or four raw egg yolks that are never heated at any point, which is why it cannot be recommended as written.
- Raw yolks, never cookedThe finished dressing is a cold suspension of raw yolk in oil and vinegar. Salmonella Enteritidis lives inside intact shell eggs as well as on them, and nothing in this procedure — no heat, no holding time — reduces it. The acid from the vinegar is nowhere near strong enough or given long enough to matter.
- Made in quantity and heldMade in quantity -- Three or four yolks with a teacupful of oil yields well over a cup of dressing, more than a single serving, and the recipe offers no cold storage beyond keeping the oil in a cold place and setting the bowl in ice water in hot weather. Ice water is not refrigeration, and raw-yolk dressing left standing is the situation modern food-safety rules were written to prevent. If you want mayonnaise, use a current recipe.
- "Oil of Lucca"Lucca, in Tuscany, was a byword for fine olive oil in the American market of the period. The couplet at the head states the proportions the author returns to at the end, three of oil to one of vinegar.
- A teacupfulTeacup measures were not standardised in American cookbooks of this period, and a teacupful is variously reckoned at anywhere from four to eight fluid ounces. "About half as much vinegar" is the author's own approximation, and the ratio he settles on at the end -- three of oil to one of vinegar -- is the figure to read the recipe by.
- The Dover egg beaterThe Dover was a standard American rotary hand beater, geared and crank-driven. The author's note that the mixture "will at once become like butter" on the addition of salt describes an emulsion tightening as it takes up oil.
- Why everything is kept coldWarm oil and warm yolks emulsify badly and break easily, which is the reason for the cold larder and the bowl set in ice water. This is a real technical point about emulsions and has nothing to do with keeping the eggs safe.
Mayonnaise reached American professional kitchens through French practice, and by the late nineteenth century it was a routine rather than a special preparation -- which is the tone of this entry, with its aside that cooks see no reason for "making so much ado about it." The name's origin is disputed and traditionally traced to Mahon in Menorca, though that account is folk etymology as much as history. What dates the page is the technology: the Dover rotary beater, in commercial use in American kitchens from the later nineteenth century onward, cut the job from a quarter of an hour of steady wrist work to a fraction of that, and the author's inclusion of both methods catches the changeover in progress. Cold storage is treated here as a matter of emulsion chemistry alone; the bacteriology of shell eggs was not part of a cook's training at the time, and recipes of this kind circulated for decades before anyone thought to warn about them.