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Sauce Vinaigrette

A chilled vinaigrette sauce made with tarragon olive oil, vinegar or lemon juice, salt, paprika, cayenne, parsley, and chives.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Tarragon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,563 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Sauce Vinaigrette

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Chill a bowl and add a small piece of ice.

  2. Add salt, and slowly pour in the olive oil while stirring rapidly.

  3. Once thickened, remove the ice and mix in the vinegar or lemon juice, chives, and parsley.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately.

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. Tarragon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Tarragon + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together589 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Parsley + chivetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Olive + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,649 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Olive + chivetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Olive oil
Forms the body of the sauce as it is whisked into the emulsion.
Vinegar or lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness of the oil.
Salt
Seasons the sauce and helps draw out flavour from the other ingredients.

The step that matters

Pouring the oil slowly while stirring rapidly. Oil added too fast does not disperse into the liquid, so the emulsion fails to thicken and the sauce separates. Adding it slowly in a thin stream lets each droplet be coated and suspended before more oil arrives.

Swap the chive

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tarragon, olive, vinegar, parsley):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Lettucefits about as well
  3. Mustardfits about as well
  4. Chivethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tarragon, olive, vinegar, parsley. 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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