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Savory Mayonnaise
Prepare Mazola Mayonnaise and to it add two tablespoons minced green pepper, one-half tablespoon minced, pickled onion, tablespoon minced, stuffed olives and one tablespoon one chopped, salted nut meats, any kind.
A mix-in variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have already made the book's Mazola Mayonnaise and are dressing it up for a luncheon salad plate. The text as printed is garbled, so read the quantities carefully before you start.
- The scrambled line"tablespoon minced, stuffed olives and one tablespoon one chopped, salted nut meats" is a typesetting error in the original. The intended reading is one tablespoon minced stuffed olives and one tablespoon chopped salted nut meats.
- QuantitiesThe additions come to about four and a half tablespoons of solids, which is a heavily loaded dressing for a modest batch of mayonnaise (the recipe does not say how much base to prepare). Halve the pepper if you want something that still pours.
- MazolaMazola is corn oil, and this book is a promotional volume built around it. Any neutral oil works; a mayonnaise made wholly with olive oil will taste quite different from what the book intends.
- Pickled onionThis means a small onion from a jar of pickles or cocktail onions, not raw onion. Drain and blot it, or the vinegar will thin the emulsion.
- Salted nut meats"nut meats" is simply shelled nuts, and the recipe leaves the kind open. Chop them fine and add them at the last moment, since they soften quickly in a wet dressing.
- Raw eggHomemade mayonnaise is uncooked egg yolk. If you are serving children, the elderly, or anyone pregnant or immunocompromised, use pasteurized eggs, and keep the finished bowl refrigerated rather than sitting out through a long luncheon.
- Make it ahead, but not far aheadAn hour in the refrigerator lets the pepper and olive flavors bloom into the base. Beyond a day the green pepper starts to weep and the nuts go limp.
This comes from one of the many oil-company cookbooks that circulated in the early twentieth century, when Corn Products Refining Company was working to establish Mazola as a household cooking fat against lard and olive oil. The dressing itself belongs to a whole family of dolled-up mayonnaises that filled American luncheon menus of the period, alongside Thousand Island and Russian dressing, when the composed cold salad plate was the standard midday dish for entertaining. The reliance on jarred pickled onions and stuffed olives is characteristic: variety came out of a shelf of such relishes rather than out of fresh produce, which was seasonal and less dependable.