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Salad Dressing Made at the Table
The yolk of a raw egg, a tablespoonful of vinegar or lemon juice, one teaspoonful of mixed mustard, one-fourth of a tablespoonful of salt, six tablespoonfuls of oil, a dash of tabasco sauce; stir the yolk, mustard and salt together with a fork until they begin to thicken; add the oil gradually, stirring all the while. More or less oil can be used.
This is table-side mayonnaise, built in a bowl with a fork in front of the guests. The emulsion itself is sound technique, but the dressing is built on a raw egg yolk that is never heated, salted, cured or acidified before service, and that is where it fails by current standards.
- The raw yolk is the problemThe yolk goes into the bowl uncooked and is eaten within minutes, with no cooking step at any point. Shell eggs can carry Salmonella enteritidis inside an intact, clean shell, and nothing in this method reduces it. Use a current recipe if you want mayonnaise.
- The acid does not make it safeA tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice against six tablespoons of oil and a yolk gives a dressing far too weakly acidic, and held far too briefly, to do anything to bacterial load. Acidification only counts as a control at measured pH over measured time.
- Made at the table means made warmMade at the table means served straight away -- The recipe is mixed in the dining room and eaten immediately, which at least avoids the holding time that lets a contaminated dressing get worse. What it does not avoid is the raw yolk itself, served to whoever is at the table, including anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised.
- The vinegar is unaccounted forThe ingredient list calls for vinegar or lemon juice and the method never mentions it again, stirring only yolk, mustard and salt before the oil goes in. The acid is presumably meant to go in with or after the oil, but the text as printed simply leaves it out.
- "Mixed mustard" and TabascoMixed mustard is prepared mustard from the pot, not dry powder; a teaspoon of powder in its place would be considerably sharper. Tabasco was a widely available branded bottle through the later nineteenth century, and its appearance here is what distinguishes this from a plain mayonnaise.
- QuantitySix tablespoons of oil against one yolk, with the acid, comes to roughly a scant half-cup of finished dressing. The closing line, that more or less oil can be used, is honest: a single yolk will carry a good deal more oil than this if added slowly enough.
Mixing the dressing at the table was a small piece of theatre, and cookbooks of the period devote long sections to distinguishing a boiled dressing, a plain French dressing and a true mayonnaise. This recipe is the last of those, scaled down to a single yolk so that it could be assembled quickly and freshly in a dining room rather than made in quantity in the kitchen. The dash of Tabasco is the American note in an otherwise French formula; the Louisiana pepper sauce had been on the market for some decades and turns up in books of this era wherever a cook wanted heat without visible pepper.