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Salad Mayonaise
717. Beat up well the yolks of two eggs, mix and pour in salad oil and a few drops of vinegar until there is sufficient sauce, and it is the consistency of thick cream. Cut slices of cold meat or fowl, and divide in pieces with cold boiled eggs and the hearts of fine lettuces laid in the dish. Then pour over it all the sauce.
A bare-bones Victorian mayonnaise poured over what amounts to a chef's salad of cold roast meat, hard-boiled egg and lettuce hearts. The recipe gives no quantities for the oil, so the cook is expected to judge by consistency.
- The hinge: add the oil slowlyTwo yolks will carry a great deal of oil, but only if it goes in a few drops at a time at first, whisked constantly, and in a thin stream thereafter. Tip it in faster than the yolks can absorb it and the sauce breaks.
- How much oilTwo yolks will carry a large quantity of oil — a cup or more — before they are saturated. The recipe leaves the amount to the cook's eye, stopping when there is "sufficient sauce" of the consistency of thick cream.
- Salad oilIn this period that ordinarily meant a mild oil, most often olive. A neutral oil such as sunflower or grapeseed gives much the same result; a strong extra-virgin oil worked hard can turn bitter.
- Seasoning is missingThe original lists only eggs, oil and vinegar. Salt, and to modern taste a little mustard, are wanted; mustard also helps hold the emulsion together.
- Room temperatureCold yolks straight from the refrigerator emulsify poorly. Let them stand until they are no longer chilled, and have the oil at the same temperature.
- Raw eggsThe sauce is never cooked. If serving to anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurised eggs or pasteurised yolks, and keep the finished salad refrigerated until it goes to table.
- Assembly and yieldAssembly -- Lettuce hearts quartered, cold chicken or beef cut in strips, hard-boiled eggs in wedges, as the recipe directs. Dress it shortly before serving, since the leaves wilt under the sauce.
- If it splitsStart a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the broken mixture into it drop by drop. Nothing is lost but time.
Mayonnaise reached English cookery books from French practice in the early nineteenth century, and the spelling was still unsettled when this book was compiled — "mayonaise", "mayonnaise" and "magnonnaise" all appear in print of the period. The name's origin is disputed; it is often traced to Port Mahon in Menorca, though that account is traditional rather than documented. What is being described here is not a dressed green salad in the modern sense but the older English salad or salmagundi arrangement: cold cooked meat or poultry, hard eggs and lettuce hearts built up in a dish and masked with sauce — a way of using the remains of a roast.