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Tomato Mayonnaise
1⅓ cups Mazola Mayonnaise 1/3 teaspoon Worcestershire 1/3 cup tomato catchup Combine and use. sauce
A three-ingredient dressing of the Russian/Thousand Island family, printed in a corn-oil promotional booklet. The only real work is reading the mangled typesetting correctly.
- The garbled measurements"11/3 cups" is 1 1/3 cups, and the stray word "sauce" at the end belongs to the Worcestershire line. Read it as: 1 1/3 cups mayonnaise, 1/3 cup tomato catsup, 1/3 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce.
- Mazola MayonnaiseMazola is a corn oil brand, and "Mazola Mayonnaise" most likely refers to mayonnaise made with the company's oil rather than to a jarred product. Any good mayonnaise works; if you make your own, use pasteurized eggs, since nothing here is cooked.
- Tomato catchupOlder catsups tended to be thinner, sharper and more heavily spiced with clove and allspice than the modern product, and often less sweet, though sweet commercial ketchup was already widespread by the early twentieth century. Today's ketchup may make a sweeter sauce; a teaspoon of cider vinegar shifts the balance back.
- The Worcestershire is not optionalA third of a teaspoon in nearly two cups of sauce sounds like nothing, but it supplies the anchovy salt and tamarind sourness that keeps the mixture from reading as sweetened mayonnaise. Add it drop by drop and taste.
- Let it standThe original says only "Combine and use," but a rest of half an hour in the refrigerator lets the catsup spices move through the emulsion, and the sauce firms up slightly as it chills.
- Yield and useAbout 1 2/3 cups, enough dressing for eight to ten salad servings. Suited to cold shrimp or lobster, hard-cooked eggs, sliced tomatoes, or a wedge of head lettuce.
- KeepingTreat it as you would the mayonnaise it is built on: covered, refrigerated, and used within a few days. The added catsup thins the emulsion enough that it may weep slightly on standing; stir rather than whisk.
Booklets like this one were published by manufacturers to teach cooks what to do with a new product, and Mazola corn oil, sold by the Corn Products Refining Company from the early twentieth century, was promoted hard as a salad oil at a time when olive oil was often bought in small quantities from the druggist. Mayonnaise thinned with tomato catsup and sharpened with Worcestershire is closely related to both Russian dressing and Thousand Island, names that begin appearing on American menus in the first decades of the century; the Thousand Island version is generally traced to the resort hotels of the St. Lawrence River, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented.