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Mayonnaise Sauce
Mix in a two-quart bowl one even tea-spoon ground mustard, one of salt, and one and a half of vinegar; beat in the yolk of a raw egg, then add very gradually half a pint pure olive-oil (or melted butter), beating briskly all the time. The mixture will become a very thick batter. Flavor with vinegar or fresh lemon-juice. Closely covered it will keep for weeks in a cold place, and is delicious. .
The proportions here are recognisable as mayonnaise, but the keeping instruction is the problem: an uncooked yolk emulsion held "for weeks in a cold place" is outside what any modern food-safety guidance allows.
- Raw yolk, never heatedThe only egg in this sauce goes in raw and is never brought to any temperature. Salmonella in a shell egg is a real if uncommon risk, and nothing in the method reduces it.
- "Weeks in a cold place"A nineteenth-century cold cellar or larder would generally have run above modern refrigeration temperatures, and the measured acid here — about a teaspoon and a half of vinegar to a cup of oil, plus an unmeasured final flavouring of vinegar or lemon juice — cannot be relied on to hold the pH low enough to inhibit growth. Current guidance treats homemade egg-yolk mayonnaise as a food to use within a few days, and a modern recipe using pasteurised egg is the safer choice.
- Half a pint of oilAn American half-pint is one cup, so the ratio is a single yolk to 8 fl oz of oil. That is at the high end of the usual proportion, though a yolk can carry more, and it fits the book's instruction to add the oil "very gradually."
- "One and a half of vinegar"The unit appears to carry over from the preceding items, so this reads as one and a half teaspoons. That is a small measured quantity, though the recipe adds further vinegar or lemon juice to taste at the end, so the finished acidity is unknown — worth noting, since acidity is exactly what would have to be measured in a keeping sauce.
- Melted butter as the alternativeThe parenthetical substitution may reflect the cost and variable quality of imported olive oil at the time. A butter-based sauce is generally less stable, given butter's water content and milk solids, and it firms up when chilled.
- The two-quart bowlNot an exaggeration. Hand-whisking a cup of oil into one yolk needs room for the whisk to move and for the emulsion to climb the sides; a cramped bowl is a common cause of a broken sauce.
The Dixie Cook Book appeared in the 1880s, one of a family of compiled regional cookbooks that recycled material freely between editions. The name is generally traced to the French mayonnaise of the early nineteenth century, itself of disputed origin — Port Mahón in Menorca is the most often repeated story, though older French sauces built on egg and oil predate any of the proposed namings. Commercial jarred mayonnaise, usually dated to Hellmann's from around 1912, brought the consistent acidity and refrigeration that a "keeps for weeks" claim would require.