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Whipped Cream Mayonnaise Dressing
When the dressing is to be used within twenty-four hours add one-third of a cup of cream, beaten stiff, to either Mayonnaise No. 1 or No. 2.
A one-line variation rather than a standalone recipe: it turns a stiff mayonnaise into a pale, airy dressing for fruit and delicate salads. The twenty-four-hour limit in the original is the whole point of the instruction and should be respected.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirWhip the cream to firm peaks in a chilled bowl, then fold it into the mayonnaise in two or three additions with a spatula. Beating it in knocks out the air and you end up with thin mayonnaise rather than a light dressing.
- What cream to buyUse heavy or whipping cream, at least 35 percent butterfat, unsweetened and unstabilized. One-third cup of liquid cream whips to roughly two-thirds of a cup. The recipe does not say how much mayonnaise the cream is being added to.
- Why twenty-four hoursWhipped cream folded into an acidic emulsion tends to deflate and weep, and the dressing can separate into a watery layer under a greasy one. Refrigerate it covered and treat the limit as real; it is a dairy sauce, not a keeping mayonnaise.
- The mayonnaise underneathButterick's Mayonnaise No. 1 and No. 2 are not reproduced here; mayonnaise of this period is a raw-yolk emulsion. If you are making the base yourself and serving it to anyone very young, elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, use pasteurized shell eggs or a pasteurized yolk product.
- Season after foldingCream mutes salt and acid noticeably. Taste once the fold is complete and correct with a little more lemon juice or salt; a spoonful of the cream may be sweetened lightly if the dressing is going on fruit.
The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from the pattern-and-magazine house that published The Delineator, and it treats mayonnaise as a family of dressings numbered and cross-referenced rather than a single recipe. Cream-lightened mayonnaise belonged to the era of the ladies' luncheon salad — fruit in nests of lettuce, chicken in aspic, the Waldorf and its many imitators — where an unrelieved oil-and-yolk dressing was thought coarse. The technique depended on a household having heavy cream on hand and someone willing to whip it by hand with a wire whisk or a rotary egg beater; before mechanical refrigeration was universal, a dressing containing whipped cream was made for the meal in front of you.