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Mayonnaise Dressing II
Use same ingredients as for Mayonnaise Dressing I, adding mashed yolk of a "hard-boiled" egg to dry ingredients.
This is a one-line variation on the book's base mayonnaise, and it cannot be recommended as written because the emulsion is built on an uncooked egg yolk that never reaches a safe temperature. The notes below explain the technique and why the risk sits where it does.
- Why the cautionMayonnaise Dressing I is raw yolk, seasonings, acid and oil, beaten cold and never heated. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella on the shell and, less often, inside the egg itself, and nothing in this method — not the lemon juice, not the vinegar — reliably kills it. Farmer's book predates the modern understanding of that hazard. Use a current recipe built on pasteurized egg if you want mayonnaise.
- Holding and serving compound the problemRaw-yolk mayonnaise held above refrigeration temperature is a growth medium, not a preservative, and a starchy, moist salad gives bacteria something to work with.
- What "dry ingredients" meansIn the base recipe the dry ingredients are the seasonings (salt, mustard and a pepper element such as paprika or cayenne), mixed together before any liquid goes in. The hard-boiled yolk is mashed smooth and worked into that group so it disperses evenly rather than lumping.
- What the cooked yolk was forA mashed hard-cooked yolk adds coagulated protein particles that help hold the emulsion, making the dressing more forgiving and less likely to separate. It also gives a paler, matte, slightly grainy dressing rather than the glossy one of the plain version.
- YieldThe original gives no yield at all.
Mayonnaise reached American cookbooks through French professional cookery in the nineteenth century, and by the time Fannie Farmer was writing at the Boston Cooking School in the 1890s it was still enough of a technical feat to warrant more than one numbered version. The trick of adding a mashed hard-boiled yolk belongs to a long line of hedges against a broken emulsion, and cooked "boiled dressings" were widespread in American salad-making alongside hand-beaten mayonnaise. Commercially made mayonnaise in jars was still years off; a cook who wanted it made it by hand, drop by drop.