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Salad Cream, or Thin Mayonaise
Reduce the thick mayonaise to the consistency of cream by adding more vinegar or vinegar and water--in some cases milk or cream--and if you wish to be particular use some clear strained chicken broth (cold) or unseasoned soup stock with the vinegar, instead of water. For lobster and other shell fish, however, all vinegar may be used, as they take away its sharpness. This salad cream used as a sauce makes almost any kind of vegetable, meat and fish palatable and relishing if served with it cold and crisp. Palatable, that is, to those who do not dislike olive oil. And some of your people will make the thin mayonaise for themselves. Some will choose their dinner in courses even from an American form bill of fare, and salads are as "familiar in their mouths as household words." Seeing you have mayonaise they are apt to order it plain and with the condiments and relishes before them make their own variations on their own plates.
My Italian friend who almost invariably for his own meals makes a salad, or at least something akin to salad, with oil poured over, looks askance at the vinegar and remarks: "Along the shores of the Mediterranean the people, the wealthy people, the mercantile people, do not use vinegar more than to the amount of a squeeze of a lemon--it is the common people, the people of the interior, the peasants (and he shrugs his shoulders contemptuously)--only the peasants who pour vinegar plentifully over their green stuff and call it salad" A remark which may serve to give the right hang of that Spanish proverb about salad-making: "A spendthrift for oil, a niggard for vinegar, and a madman to mix the salad together" For there are those who think the one who pours in any oil at all is the madman, and at any rate think it will be better to let the spendthrift donate the vinegar instead of the oil. There are also motives of economy in favor of the wrong reading; but we cooks are perfectly disinterested and had just as lief make our dressing without oil as not. The following, if a rather large quantity for fifty persons for dinner, is not too much for a supper salad on a hot summer evening, when the thought alone of all other food is wearisome disgust.
This is a variation instruction rather than a standalone formula: it assumes you have already made a stiff mayonnaise and want a pourable sauce. Everything hinges on how the thinning liquid goes in.
- Add the liquid slowlyA thick mayonnaise will break if flooded with cold liquid at once. Whisk it in a spoonful at a time; if it starts to look grainy or slack, stop and beat hard before adding more.
- How much to addThe recipe gives no measurements; work by eye. A few spoonfuls of liquid per cup of thick mayonnaise will loosen it toward heavy cream, and more again for a pouring sauce, but the base mayonnaise varies in stiffness so judge by consistency rather than by count.
- Vinegar strength has changedHousehold vinegars of this period were not standardized and varied considerably in acidity, unlike the 5 percent product sold now. You cannot assume a modern vinegar matches what the author had, so add it in stages and taste.
- The broth version is highly perishableMayonnaise thinned with chicken broth or stock is a raw-egg sauce carrying meat juices. Make it the day it is served, keep it refrigerated, and do not leave it standing at room temperature on a buffet.
- Raw eggThe underlying mayonnaise is uncooked. If you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs or pasteurized liquid egg.
- "Unseasoned soup stock"Taken to mean unsalted and unspiced. The text calls for the chicken broth cold, and the same is sensible for stock: warm liquid risks breaking the emulsion, and unskimmed fat will cloud the dressing.
- All-vinegar for shellfishThe author says lobster and other shellfish take away the vinegar's sharpness, so no water or stock is needed to soften it. He offers milk or cream only as an alternative thinning liquid in other cases.
- ScaleThe closing sentence refers forward to a separate large-batch salad recipe, not to this one. Taken on its own, this gives no quantities at all; work from whatever mayonnaise you have.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the late nineteenth-century wave of American trade manuals written for hotel and restaurant kitchens rather than households, which is why the text drifts into how guests order from a bill of fare and how much dressing a party of fifty will want. "Salad cream" was one term for a mayonnaise loosened to pouring consistency, and the name survived in Britain as a bottled commercial product. The Spanish proverb quoted here about the spendthrift, the niggard and the madman appears in a number of English-language cookbooks of the period. The passage also captures a working cook's shrug at the whole argument: the author himself notes there were "motives of economy" favouring the reading that spares the oil.