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Cream Mayonnaise
To Mazola Mayonnaise, add an equal quantity of plain cream or slightly sour cream whipped and seasoned further with paprika. If for fruit salads, a little Karo may be stirred in.
A two-line variation rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have a bowl of mayonnaise and are lightening it. The hinge is the folding — whip the cream separately and fold it in, because beating it into the mayonnaise breaks the aeration and you get a thin, greasy dressing.
- Mazola and KaroBoth are brand names from the Corn Products Refining Company, which published this booklet. Mazola is corn oil, still sold; Karo is corn syrup, and the light (clear) variety is presumably what is intended here, though the recipe does not say. Any neutral oil and any mild syrup or honey will behave much the same way.
- The mayonnaise baseThe book's own Mazola mayonnaise is an uncooked egg-yolk emulsion. If you are serving this to anyone elderly, pregnant or immunocompromised, use pasteurized shell eggs or a good commercial mayonnaise as the base.
- Equal quantityHalf mayonnaise, half cream. The text does not say whether the cream is measured before or after whipping; measuring before whipping gives the paler, more mousse-like dressing.
- "Slightly sour cream"This means cream left to acidify naturally in a cool place rather than deliberately cultured. Modern pasteurized cream is more likely to spoil than to sour cleanly; cultured sour cream or crème fraîche, thinned with a spoonful of heavy cream, is the practical substitute.
- PaprikaSweet Hungarian or a plain sweet paprika. The intent is colour and a faint warmth, not heat; add it sparingly and taste again after it has had a little time to blend.
- The Karo for fruitStart with a teaspoon per cup and taste. Corn syrup is less sweet than sugar by weight and adds body, which may be why it suits a dressing served over cut fruit.
- Yield and holdingA cup of mayonnaise plus a cup of whipped cream serves eight to ten as a salad dressing. Fold it no more than an hour before serving; it deflates and separates on standing, and it will not come back.
- How it was meant to be usedSpooned over a wedge of iceberg, a moulded fruit salad, or halved pears on lettuce — the luncheon salads of the period. It is too rich and too soft for anything that needs tossing.
This is promotional literature as much as cookery. Corn Products Refining Company, formed in 1906, spent the following decades persuading American cooks that corn oil and corn syrup belonged in dishes previously made with olive oil, butter and cane sugar, and booklets like this one put Mazola and Karo into every course of the menu. Cream mayonnaise itself is older than the brands: thinning mayonnaise with whipped cream is essentially the same idea as the French sauce chantilly or mayonnaise mousseline, and it arrived in American cookbooks in the late nineteenth century alongside the fashion for fruit and moulded gelatine salads, where a sharp vinaigrette was thought too aggressive. The instruction to use "slightly sour cream" is a quiet reminder that in a household relying on an icebox or a cool larder cream turned on its own schedule, and a cook worked with whatever stage it had reached.