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Mayonnaise Sauce for Salmon

A creamy sauce made from egg yolks, salad oil, pepper, salt, and tarragon vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,399 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Mayonnaise Sauce for Salmon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chill the salad oil in a bowl of ice water for 30 minutes.

  2. In a quart saucepan set on crushed ice, add the egg yolks.

  3. Sprinkle the pepper and salt over the yolks and stir them together.

Make the mayonnaise

  1. Slowly drizzle the salad oil over the yolks while whisking rapidly.

  2. Continue adding oil and whisking until the mixture thickens.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pepper + tarragontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Tarragon + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Egg + tarragontop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,789 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  5. Egg + vinegartop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and vinegar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,922 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Emulsify the oil into the mixture and thicken it into a rich, stable sauce.
Salad oil
Provides the fat that forms the body and richness of the mayonnaise.

The step that matters

Adding the oil slowly while whisking rapidly. Oil added too fast cannot be absorbed by the yolks, so the emulsion breaks and the sauce stays runny or separates. Slow drizzling with constant whisking lets tiny oil droplets disperse and be held in the yolk's lecithin-stabilised mixture.

Swap the tarragon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, pepper, vinegar):

  1. Tarragonthe original
  2. Dillfits about as well
  3. Parsleyfits less well
  4. Allspicefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, pepper, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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