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Mayonnaise Dressing (Making this dressing use)
In making this dressing, use an egg-beater. A large quart bowl with straight sides. Have both well cooled with ice; also a fresh egg and the oil to be used for the dressing. Put the yolk into the bowl and beat well before adding any oil. Beat in the oil, a few drops at a time, until it shows that it is combining perfectly with the egg, then add more freely. When the mixture becomes too stiff to beat easily, add one at a time, two teaspoonfuls of lemon juice or vinegar, which will thin it. Beat in more oil until again very stiff, when thin with acid as before. By thus alienating the oil and acid, a quart or more of oil may be made into a light, thick, cream colored dressing with only one egg yolk. With an assistant to pour the oil, very slowly at first and more freely afterward, one can convert a large bottle of oil into a deliciously smooth, thick mayonnaise dressing in a short time.
For seasoning, a tablespoonful of mustard, one teaspoonful of sugar, one teaspoonful of salt, cayenne to taste; I should say one-quarter of a saltspoonful of cayenne.
A late-Victorian mayonnaise built by hand, written when a rotary egg-beater was the new labor-saving device. The method is sound; the proportions are heroic.
- The hinge: add oil drop by drop at the startThe emulsion is made or lost in the first two tablespoons. Until the mixture visibly thickens and turns pale, the oil goes in a few drops at a time; only then can it be poured in a thin steady stream.
- "Alienating" means alternating"Alienating" appears to be a slip for alternating -- the sense the method plainly requires. Each addition of lemon juice or vinegar loosens a mixture that has grown too stiff to beat, and restores room for more oil.
- One yolk to a quart of oilA single yolk can technically emulsify that much oil, but the result is fragile and will break if it warms or is jostled. Around 3/4 to 1 cup of oil per yolk gives a dressing that holds; scale the seasonings to whatever quantity you actually make.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is generally reckoned a quarter teaspoon, so a quarter of one is a pinch of cayenne, barely 1/16 teaspoon. The mustard is most likely dry mustard powder rather than prepared, though the recipe does not specify.
- Season the yolk, not the finished sauceThe salt, mustard and sugar are listed last, but dry mustard is itself an emulsifier and works best beaten into the yolk before any oil goes in. Cayenne and additional salt can be corrected at the end.
- The oilNineteenth-century American "salad oil" often meant olive or cottonseed, though this recipe says only "the oil." A neutral oil, or olive cut half and half with a neutral one, suits modern palates; strong extra-virgin olive oil is often said to turn bitter under prolonged beating.
- Cold is not optionalChilling the bowl, the egg and the oil is the recipe's own insurance. Warmth is a common cause of a broken emulsion, and it also shortens the keeping time of a raw-yolk sauce.
- Raw eggNothing here is cooked. Use pasteurized eggs if serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, keep the dressing refrigerated, and use it within three or four days.
- If it breaksStart a fresh yolk in a clean cold bowl and beat the curdled mixture into it a spoonful at a time. Nothing is lost but the extra yolk.
Mayonnaise is generally traced to Mahón in Menorca and a French naval kitchen of the 1750s, though the story is traditional rather than documented, and rival derivations from moyeu, an old French word for egg yolk, have long been argued. By the time of this book the sauce was well established in American households, carried along by the vogue for composed salads of chicken, lobster and celery that fill this section. Two things made it practical for domestic cooks: cheap bottled salad oil and the geared rotary egg-beater, in common use since the 1870s, which turned a wrist-punishing job with a fork into something a cook could finish, as the author says, in a short time, with an assistant pouring. Commercial jarred mayonnaise had not yet arrived, so a quart of it beaten up by hand for a party table was an entirely reasonable ambition.