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Salad Dressing (Yolks of two hard-boiled eggs)
Yolks of two hard-boiled eggs rubbed very fine and smooth, one tea-spoon English mustard, one of salt, the yolks of two raw eggs beaten into the other, dessert-spoon of fine sugar. Add very fresh sweet-oil poured in by very small quantities, and beaten as long as the mixture continues to thicken, then add vinegar till as thin as desired. If not hot enough with mustard, add a little cayenne pepper.-Mrs. Gov. Cheney.
This is a hand-beaten mayonnaise of the older type, built on cooked yolks for body and raw yolks for emulsifying power. The reason it cannot be recommended as written is the raw egg, which never reaches any temperature at all; the notes below cover both that problem and the archaic wording.
- Raw yolks, never heatedTwo raw yolks are beaten in and the dressing is served cold, so nothing in the method brings the egg above room temperature. Salmonella in shell eggs is an interior risk, not just a shell-surface one, and a cold acidic dressing does not reliably kill it. Use a current mayonnaise or salad-dressing recipe instead.
- Vinegar is not a safeguardThe acid goes in last and in an amount left entirely to the cook ("till as thin as desired"), so there is no way to know the finished pH. Acidification only reduces risk at known concentrations and holding times, neither of which this recipe specifies.
- No keeping instructionsThere is no direction here about how long the dressing may stand, or about cool storage, which matters for an unheated egg emulsion.
- Sweet-oil"Sweet oil" means olive oil — mild and fresh rather than sweetened. The insistence on "very fresh" likely reflects how readily oil bought in this period went rancid.
- English mustardDry mustard powder, not the prepared yellow condiment. It contributes heat, and mustard also acts as a secondary emulsifier, though the recipe itself refers to it only for its heat.
- Dessert-spoonBetween a teaspoon and a tablespoon, conventionally about two teaspoons. Nineteenth-century spoon measures were not standardised, so this is an approximation.
- Why two kinds of yolkThe hard-boiled yolks, rubbed "fine and smooth," give a thick opaque base and forgive a broken emulsion; the raw yolks do the actual work of holding the oil.
Recipes of this shape — cooked yolks pounded smooth, raw yolks beaten in, oil added drop by drop — sit between the old English boiled salad dressing and the French mayonnaise that gained ground alongside it in American cookbooks over the second half of the nineteenth century, though cooked-yolk dressings persisted well past 1900. The recipe belongs to the compiled, contributed genre: hundreds of short recipes credited to named women, often wives of public men, whose signature vouched for the receipt as much as the method did. The attribution "Mrs. Gov. Cheney" is typical of that convention, identifying the contributor by her husband's office rather than her own name. The reliance on olive oil, called sweet oil, is a reminder that imported oil was a grocery item to be judged for freshness rather than a pantry staple, and the double-yolk technique is essentially insurance for a cook working with a fork or a wooden spoon and no way to fix a split emulsion quickly.