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Sauce Mayonnaise
Place in an earthen bowl a couple of fresh egg-yolks and half a teaspoonful of ground English mustard, half a pinch of salt, half a saltspoonful of red pepper, and stir well for about three minutes without stopping, then pour in, drop at a time, one and a half cupfuls of the best olive oil, and should it become too thick, add a little at a time, some good vinegar, stirring constantly.
This is the classic hand-whisked emulsion as it was made in a hotel garde-manger around 1896, and the technique is sound. The problem is that the eggs are never cooked and, as written, the mixture may never be acidified at all.
- Why it fails todayRaw yolks from shell eggs carry a risk of Salmonella Enteritidis, which can be present inside an intact, clean egg rather than only on the shell. A hotel kitchen in the 1890s used the sauce within hours and thought nothing of it; a bowl held at room temperature is a growth medium.
- The vinegar is conditionalNote that acid appears only "should it become too thick." Modern practice relies on a measured quantity of vinegar or lemon juice to bring the sauce to a low pH, which suppresses bacterial growth. Here the acid is an optional thinning agent, so there is no acidification step to depend on. If you want mayonnaise, use a current recipe built on pasteurized eggs or shell eggs with measured acid.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so "half a saltspoonful" of red pepper is about an eighth of a teaspoon. "Half a pinch" of salt is an informal measure common in cookbooks of this period; it means less than a pinch.
- Red pepperIn American cookbooks of this period "red pepper" generally means cayenne, not paprika and not sweet pepper.
- Ground English mustardDry mustard powder, unmixed. Mustard has emulsifying power as well as flavour, and here it goes in with the yolks before any oil.
- The earthen bowlThe recipe gives no reason for it. Glazed earthenware is unreactive with vinegar and heavy enough not to skate under a whisk. Glass or stainless steel does the same work; unlined copper or aluminium does not.
- YieldA cup and a half of oil plus two yolks gives roughly a cup and three-quarters of finished sauce, a little under a pint.
History: Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms at the Waldorf from 1893 and put his name to this book in 1896. The name is most often traced to Mahón, the port on Menorca taken by a French force under the Duc de Richelieu in 1756, with mahonnaise supposedly carried home as a trophy — a traditional account rather than a documented one, and rival derivations from manier (to handle) and from Bayonne have been argued just as long. By the 1890s a hand-beaten oil-and-yolk emulsion was a foundation of the American hotel cold larder, the base from which Russian, tartare and green sauces were built, and the dressing that bound the Waldorf's own celebrated salad of apple and celery.