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Mayonnaise Sauce

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Mayonnaise Sauce

Why it works: Tarragon and pepper 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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Break the yolks into a bowl.

  2. Add salt and pepper, and stir with a wooden spoon until well mixed.

Make the emulsion

  1. Slowly add the vinegar and oil by drops, stirring continuously in the same direction to prevent curdling.

  2. The sauce will have a creamy appearance when finished.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Tarragon + peppertop 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. Vinegar + peppertop 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
Their lecithin emulsifies the oil into the vinegar, holding the sauce together and giving it body.
Salad oil
Forms the bulk of the sauce as tiny droplets, providing richness and a smooth, creamy texture.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds acidity and aroma, and its liquid is what the oil disperses into.

The step that matters

Adding the vinegar and oil slowly. Egg yolk lecithin can only coat so many oil droplets at once. Adding the liquids drop by drop while stirring lets each droplet be coated and dispersed. Adding them too fast overwhelms the yolk, so the emulsion breaks and the sauce curdles or separates.

Swap the tarragon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, vinegar, pepper. 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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