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Mayonnaise Dressing
1/2 teaspoonful powdered sugar. Yolk of 1 raw egg. 1/2 to 2/3 cup salad oil. teaspoonful powdered sugar 1/4 teaspoonful dry mustard 1/4 teaspoonful salt Yolk of I raw egg to cup salad oil 2 tablespoonfuls lemon-juice A very little cayenne pepper Put all the dry ingredients into a bowl. Mix and add the yolk of an egg. Beat all together with a silver fork until thickened, then add the lemonjuice little by little, beating it in. Then put in the oil a teaspoonful at a time, beating well with a small Dover egg beater between each addition of oil. Oil and egg should be very cold.
This dressing may be made thicker by using twothirds of a cup of oil instead of one-half. Two tablespoonfuls of thick, sweet cream may be stirred into it as an addition.
A classic hand-beaten mayonnaise, built in a bowl with a fork and finished with a rotary beater. The proportions are standard for the period; the technique is where success or failure lies.
- Add the oil slowlyThis is the hinge of the whole recipe. A teaspoon at a time, fully beaten in before the next addition, is what forms the emulsion. Pouring faster will break it, and once broken it must be rescued by beating the split mixture drop by drop into a fresh yolk.
- Everything coldThe instruction that oil and egg be very cold is not decoration; cold ingredients give a firmer emulsion, and it was the standard direction of the period. Chill the bowl too if the kitchen is warm.
- Oil quantityThe oil measure in this transcription is unclear, but the closing note tells you the intended figure: half a cup as written, two-thirds of a cup for a thicker dressing. One yolk will carry either amount.
- Sugar measureThe sugar is given without a number in this transcription. A teaspoonful, matching the mustard and salt, is a plausible reading, but the original may equally have read a half or a quarter.
- Salad oilAt the time this meant a bland oil; cottonseed and light olive were both sold for the purpose. Use a neutral oil such as sunflower or grapeseed; a strong extra-virgin olive oil can turn bitter under prolonged beating.
- Silver fork and Dover beaterThe silver fork was probably specified because the ordinary steel of the day could discolour egg and lemon. A whisk, or a food processor with the oil trickled through the feed tube, does the same work; the Dover was a hand-cranked rotary beater.
- Raw eggThe yolk is never cooked. Use a pasteurised egg if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, and keep the finished dressing refrigerated, using it within two or three days.
- YieldAbout two-thirds to three-quarters of a cup, enough to dress cold chicken or turkey for four to six. The optional two tablespoons of cream loosen it into something closer to a salad cream and shorten its keeping time further.
Mayonnaise earns its place in a book of left-overs because it was a standard means of making cold cooked poultry into a dish worth serving again: chicken salad, turkey mayonnaise, moulded jellies and sandwich fillings all begin here. The name is generally traced to the French sauce mayonnaise of the early nineteenth century, and commercial jarred versions did not become common in American kitchens until the following decades. The specified silver fork and the branded Dover egg beater place the recipe in the decades either side of 1900: the Dover, based on a United States patent of 1870, became the most widely used domestic rotary beater, and cookbooks of the era name it as casually as we would name a stand mixer.