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Mayonnaise Dressing (Yolk of one egg salt mustard)
Yolk of one egg, salt, mustard and cayenne pepper to taste; stir these together; add olive oil slowly, stirring constantly until it is thick; add a third of a teaspoonful of vinegar or a little lemon juice; beat the white of the egg stiff and stir gently into the oil.
This is a raw-egg emulsion with almost no acid, and that combination is the reason it cannot be recommended as printed. The notes below explain where the recipe falls outside current food-safety practice; use a current mayonnaise recipe if you want to make one.
- Raw yolk and raw white, never heatedNothing in this preparation reaches a temperature that would kill Salmonella, which can be present inside intact shell eggs as well as on them. The recipe compounds the problem by folding in the raw white as well as the yolk, doubling the raw egg in the bowl.
- The acid is far too low to compensateA third of a teaspoonful of vinegar against a whole egg and an unspecified but substantial quantity of oil is a negligible amount of acid, far below the level at which acidity would meaningfully suppress pathogens. Modern commercial mayonnaise is both markedly more acidic and made with pasteurised egg; this dressing is neither.
- No indication of chilling or holding timeThe book gives no instruction to refrigerate or to use the dressing promptly. A room-temperature, low-acid raw-egg emulsion is a favourable medium for bacterial growth.
- Oil quantity is unstatedThe original never says how much olive oil, only "slowly... until it is thick." One yolk will carry roughly three-quarters to one cup of oil before it breaks, so the yield is somewhere near a cup — but the recipe genuinely leaves this to the cook's judgement.
- What the beaten white is doingFolding stiff egg white into the finished emulsion makes the dressing lighter, paler and bulkier. It also puts a second portion of raw egg into the bowl.
- Cayenne and mustardBoth are seasoning here, not preservatives. The dry mustard does help the emulsion hold — mustard flour contains mucilage that acts as a stabiliser — but it contributes nothing to safety.
Mayonnaise arrived in American household books through the French professional tradition and became a standard dressing for elaborate composed salads — chicken, lobster, celery, moulded vegetables in aspic. Its name is generally traced to Mahón in Menorca, taken by French forces in 1756, though the derivation is traditional rather than settled and rival explanations point to manier, to handle, or to Bayonne. What is clear is how much work it was: the emulsion had to be built by hand, with the oil added a few drops at a time and the stirring kept steady, and cookbooks of the period give directions for rescuing a curdled batch as well as for making one. This version folds in an egg white, which extends one yolk's worth of emulsion into a larger bowl of dressing.