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Mock Mayonaise
A cook who knows nothing but the best may fare badly sometimes if he go to a restaurant where he is expected to make the following and is unable to meet the requirement:
Make the cooked paste precisely as if for cream puffs using butter. Perhaps half of that receipt will suffice. Work in eggs the same way. When it is nearly soft enough begin and add a little oil and a little vinegar, then another whole egg, a little mustard, more oil and vinegar, and so on until it is like mayonaise. A large quantity can be made with but little expense for olive oil in that way. This mock sauce is used to spread over the top of a chicken or lobster salad in many restaurants that are called first class. The custom is growing in favor everywhere and a particularly prevalent now in San Francisco of setting a midday lunch instead of dinner and having the dinner at 5 or 6 o'clock in the evening.
This lunch makes a demand for good work in cold dishes of all kinds, and gives encouragement for its display that is never experienced under the plan of three hot meals a day. The various articles considered in this category of salads and cold dishes have everyone of them a use for the midday cold meal, they can be set out to the utmost advantage, and become as important a part of the steward's and cook's resources as the entrees, roasts and game for a hot dinner.
This is a cost-cutting restaurant sauce: choux paste stretched with oil, vinegar and eggs until it behaves like mayonnaise. The original assumes you already know the cream puff paste by heart, so the quantities are given only by reference.
- The base is pâte à choux"Cooked paste as for cream puffs using butter" means the standard panade: bring water and butter to a boil, beat in flour, and cook until the mass leaves the side of the pan. Half a cream puff batch is roughly 1/2 cup water, 4 tbsp butter and 1/2 cup flour.
- The hinge is temperature"Work in eggs the same way" means as for cream puffs: let the cooked paste cool from hot to warm before the eggs go in. Eggs beaten into paste that is still very hot will set into lumps rather than smooth into it.
- Add fat the way you would for real mayonnaise"A little oil and a little vinegar" means a teaspoon or so at a time, fully beaten in before the next addition. The starch paste is forgiving compared with a yolk-only emulsion, but dumping oil still splits it.
- Proportions are left to the cookNo amount of oil, vinegar or mustard is specified; the instruction is to work by feel until it looks and tastes like mayonnaise. Expect somewhere around 1/2 to 3/4 cup oil and 2 to 3 tbsp vinegar per half-batch of paste, adjusted for the consistency you want.
- Raw eggThe eggs beaten in after the paste is cooked are never heated. Use pasteurized shell eggs if the sauce is going to sit on a buffet or be served to anyone vulnerable, keep it refrigerated, and use it within a day.
- It is a coating, not a dressingThe intended use is masking the top of a chicken or lobster salad, so it should be thick enough to hold its shape and not run off. Thin it with a little vinegar or water only if you want it pourable.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities, so the yield depends entirely on how much oil and egg is worked into the paste; the point of the method is that a small amount of oil stretches to cover a large platter.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for working American hotel and restaurant cooks in the 1880s and 90s, and his books are full of exactly this kind of frank shop-floor economy: the passage opens by warning that a cook trained only on "the best" may be caught out when a house expects the cheap version. Olive oil was an imported luxury in nineteenth-century American kitchens, and a starch-bound sauce let a steward cover a whole platter of chicken or lobster salad on a fraction of the oil a true mayonnaise would take — the same logic behind the flour-thickened "boiled dressings" that dominated American cookbooks well into the twentieth century. The digression on San Francisco is a genuine snapshot of a shift in dining hours: as the main meal moved to the evening, the midday meal became a cold spread, and cold sauces, aspics and masked salads turned into a serious part of a cook's repertoire rather than an afterthought.