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Mayonnaise Dressing
1 Egg Yolk 1 Teaspoon Sugar Teaspoon Salt Teaspoon Mustard Teaspoon Paprika 1/2 Tablespoon Lemon Juice 3/4 Cup Salad Oil Beat yolk of egg. Add dry ingredients and blend. Add acid and beat thoroughly. Add oil gradually, about onefourth teaspoon at a time until two tablespoons are used, then add oil more rapidly and continue beating until the dressing is thick and creamy.
A textbook hand-beaten mayonnaise: one yolk, three-quarters of a cup of oil, and patience at the start. Everything depends on how slowly the first two tablespoons of oil go in.
- The hinge: the first two tablespoonsAdding oil a quarter-teaspoon at a time until two tablespoons are in is not fussiness — it is what builds the emulsion. Once the base is thick and glossy, oil can go in a thin steady stream.
- Missing fractionsThe printed measures for salt, mustard and paprika appear to have lost their fractions somewhere between the original page and this text. Quarter-teaspoon salt, quarter- to half-teaspoon dry mustard and a pinch of paprika are in keeping with dressings of this size; a full teaspoon of salt would be far too much.
- Salad oilIn a book of this period this most likely means a bland, neutral oil — cottonseed, corn or a light olive oil. Modern sunflower, grapeseed or canola gives the same result. Extra-virgin olive oil is often said to turn bitter under hard beating.
- Room temperatureA cold yolk and cold oil emulsify less readily. Let both stand out of the refrigerator for a while before starting; temperature as well as technique can account for a batch that breaks.
- Dry mustard earns its placeIt is here as much for emulsification as for flavour. Mustard powder helps hold oil and yolk together and makes the sauce noticeably more forgiving.
- If it breaksStart a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the split mixture into it drop by drop. Nothing is lost but time.
- Raw yolkThe egg is never cooked and the lemon juice does not sterilise it. Use pasteurised eggs, particularly if serving children, pregnant women or anyone immune-compromised, and keep the finished dressing refrigerated and use within three or four days.
- YieldAbout one cup — enough to dress a salad for four to six, or to bind a bowl of chicken or potato salad.
Mayonnaise reached American home cooks as a mark of refinement well before it reached their pantry shelves in jars. The name is generally traced to Mahón, the Minorcan port taken by the French in 1756, though that story is traditional rather than documented, and rival explanations tie it to the old French moyeu, meaning egg yolk. What makes this version characteristic of its moment is the arithmetic: bride's cookbooks and domestic-science manuals of the early twentieth century broke sauces down into exact spoonfuls and drilled the order of operations, on the theory that a young housekeeper with no cook to imitate could still get a reliable result. The insistence on quarter-teaspoons of oil is that pedagogy on the page. Commercially bottled mayonnaise was already appearing in delicatessens by the 1910s, but for a generation yet a hand-beaten bowl of it remained the expected thing at a good table.