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Salad-Dressing with Potato
Peel one large potato, boil, mash until all lumps are out, and add the yolk of a raw egg, stir all well together and season with a tea spoon of mustard and a little salt; add about half a gill of oliveoil and vinegar, putting in only a drop or two at a time, and stirring constantly, as the success of the dressing depends on its smooth. This dressing is very nice with celery or cabbage chopped fine, and seasoned with a little salt and vinegar. - Mrs. E. L. Fay. ness.
This is an uncooked egg-yolk emulsion, softened with potato in the way older cookbooks did before commercial mayonnaise. The reading notes below explain the text, and why the dressing as printed should not be eaten.
- Raw yolk, never heatedThe only egg here is a raw yolk beaten into cold potato, oil and vinegar; nothing in the method brings it to a temperature that would destroy Salmonella, which can be present inside an intact shell egg. The vinegar is added a drop or two at a time and is far too dilute and too briefly in contact to make the yolk safe. Use a current dressing recipe instead.
- No refrigeration in the originalThe recipe gives no holding or chilling instruction of any kind, and a cold potato-and-yolk mixture left at room temperature is a good growth medium, which compounds the first problem rather than being a separate one.
- A gillA gill in American usage is half a cup, so half a gill is about 4 tablespoons (British gills ran larger, at 5 fluid ounces). The text says "half a gill of oliveoil and vinegar" without splitting the two, so the proportion between them is genuinely ambiguous.
- The mangled last word"depends on its smooth. ... - Mrs. E. L. Fay. ness." is a typesetting accident. The sentence reads "depends on its smoothness," with the stray syllable dropped after the attribution.
- Why the potato is thereMashed potato appears as a thickener and extender in some nineteenth-century salad dressings: it makes a small amount of oil go further and gives a body that is less prone to breaking than a straight yolk emulsion. That function is worth knowing even though this particular formula should not be made.
Potato-thickened salad dressings turn up repeatedly in American community cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s, the period The Dixie Cook-Book belongs to. Bulking a dressing with mashed potato stretched the oil and produced something closer to a boiled dressing than to true mayonnaise. The suggested pairing with finely chopped celery or cabbage points at the same economy, since these were the winter salad vegetables available long before lettuce could be shipped year-round. The attribution to Mrs. E. L. Fay reflects one strand of the book's construction: some of its receipts were contributed by named householders, though many others carry no credit at all.