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Mayonnaise, Colored
Mayonnaise may be colored green in the following manner: Boil a double handful of spinach until tender, drain it, let it cool, and squeeze dry. Mash it thoroughly' by pounding, adding one spoonful of the mayonnaise; pass the whole through a fine sieve, and mix with the dressing. A lighter shade may be obtained by boiling and mashing green peas and using them in the same way.
To produce a red tint for a lobster or fish salad, pound the coral of a lobster, pass it through a fine sieve, and add it to the dressing.
This is a set of three tinting methods rather than a dressing in itself; it assumes you already have a bowl of thick, hand-beaten mayonnaise standing by. The whole trick is getting color in without getting water in.
- Squeeze the spinach harder than you thinkWet purée will break or thin a mayonnaise. After boiling, cool the spinach, then wring it in a towel until no more liquid comes out; the paste should be stiff, not slack.
- "A double handful" of spinachAn unmeasured quantity, probably a few ounces of raw leaves, cooking down to a small amount of stiff pulp. Judge it against the amount of dressing you have rather than by weight.
- Pounding and sievingA mortar and a drum sieve were the period tools. A small food processor or immersion blender does the same job, but still push the purée through a fine strainer — unsieved fibers show as flecks and spoil the point of the exercise.
- Add the mayonnaise a spoonful at a timeThe spoonful of dressing worked into the pulp is a dilution step. Loosen the paste with two or three spoonfuls, then fold that back into the bulk, rather than dropping stiff purée into the whole bowl.
- The pea versionFresh shelled peas or frozen peas both work; boil until soft, cool, and treat exactly as the spinach. Peas carry more sugar and moisture, so the shade is paler and the dressing slackens more.
- Lobster coralThe coral is the roe of a hen lobster, black-green when raw and scarlet once heated. Take it from a lobster that has already been cooked, or the dressing will be tinted with raw shellfish roe; sieve it while still warm and it passes far more easily.
- EggsIf you are making the base mayonnaise from scratch, use pasteurized shell eggs — the yolks are never heated, and the dressing may sit out on a buffet for some time.
- KeepingColored mayonnaise fades and weeps. Make it the day it is served and keep it cold; the green in particular tends to dull toward olive if it is left standing at room temperature.
Tinted mayonnaise belongs to the age of the cold buffet, when a fish or lobster salad was expected to arrive masked, banded and garnished rather than simply dressed. The green version is a stripped-back relative of the French sauce verte, which in classic practice is pounded spinach with herbs — tarragon, chervil, watercress — folded into mayonnaise; here it is spinach alone, apparently because color rather than flavor is the aim. The coral tint is thriftier still: the roe of a hen lobster was too handsome to waste, and it was often reserved for butters and sauces to be served alongside the same animal. That such directions appear in a household manual says something about what an ambitious hostess thought she owed her table — the salad course was where a cook showed off, and a pale green or coral dressing spread over a molded fish salad did the work that a modern plate does with a garnish.