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Mayonnaise Dressing (Tablespoonful of mustard one)
A tablespoonful of mustard, one of sugar, one teaspoonful of salt, one quarter of a saltspoon of cayenne, the yolks of three uncooked eggs, the juice of a lemon, two tablespoonfuls of vinegar, a pint of oil; beat the yolks and dry ingredients, until they are very light and thick, with a beater or silver spoon. The bowl in which the dressing is made should be in a pan of ice water. Add a few drops of oil at a time until the dressing becomes very thick and rather hard; after it has reached this stage the oil can be added more rapidly; when it gets so thick that the beater turns hard, add a little vinegar; now add the lemon juice and a cup of whipped cream is a great improvement. The cream may be omitted without injury. Place on ice.
This is a classic uncooked mayonnaise: three raw yolks emulsified with a pint of oil and held on ice. The technique is sound, but the eggs are never brought to any temperature at all, and the dressing is then stored cold for keeping.
- Raw yolks, no kill stepNothing in this recipe heats the eggs. Salmonella Enteritidis can be present inside an intact shell egg, and an emulsion beaten cold and held on ice gives it no barrier. Modern guidance treats uncooked shell-egg dressings as unsafe for general serving, and especially for the very young, the elderly, pregnant women and anyone immunocompromised.
- The acid is not a safeguardOne lemon's juice plus two tablespoonfuls of vinegar against a pint of oil and three yolks is unlikely to bring the finished dressing down to the pH at which acid would reliably inhibit pathogens, though the recipe gives no way to know the figure. Acid flavours the dressing and slows spoilage bacteria; it does not make raw egg safe.
- "Place on ice" is not refrigerationA bowl in a pan of ice water holds near freezing only while the ice lasts, and drifts upward as it melts; the recipe's final direction is simply "Place on ice," with no indication of how long. Extended holding of a raw-egg emulsion at melting-ice or cellar temperatures is the condition that allows a small initial contamination to become a large one.
- The whipped cream makes it worseFolding in a cup of cream at the end adds a second uncooked dairy component and dilutes what little acid there is, raising the pH of the finished dressing and shortening its usable life further.
- If you want mayonnaiseUse a current recipe written for pasteurized egg or a cooked-base dressing. That is the whole of the advice here; the proportions below should be read, not followed.
- Units, for reading the textA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, so "one quarter of a saltspoon of cayenne" is roughly a sixteenth of a teaspoon. A pint is two cups; the mustard is dry mustard powder, not prepared, since the recipe has it beaten in with the "dry ingredients." The quantities yield roughly two and a half to three cups of dressing, more with the cream.
Mayonnaise entered American cookbooks from French practice in the nineteenth century and was for a time associated with a fashionable salad course; by the period of the Twentieth Century Cook Book versions appear in many general household manuals, and directions of this kind commonly warn that the emulsion breaks if the yolks warm. A whipped-cream enrichment of this sort is more often met with in American than in French practice. What the recipe records most clearly is the equipment of the turn-of-the-century kitchen: a silver spoon or a hand beater and a pan of ice, no mechanical refrigeration, and no awareness that an intact egg could be contaminated before it was cracked -- Salmonella Enteritidis inside the shell was not recognised until much later. Commercially jarred mayonnaise made with acidified and later pasteurized egg followed in the early twentieth century.