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New Way to Make Mayonnaise

A homemade mayonnaise made by whisking egg, oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

New Way to Make Mayonnaise

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mayonnaise

  1. Place the whole egg in a bowl.

  2. Beat in the oil gradually.

  3. Add lemon juice, salt, and pepper to taste.

  4. Add 1 tablespoon of boiling water for each cup of mayonnaise and beat until combined.

Cool and store

  1. Cool the mayonnaise.

  2. Place it on ice to prevent separation.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Olive + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Olive + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,263 recipes

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

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Egg + olivetop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,340 recipes

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

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Whole egg
Its proteins emulsify the oil and water into a stable, thick sauce.
Oil
Forms the bulk of the emulsion, giving mayonnaise its richness and body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens flavour and helps balance the richness of the oil.

The step that matters

Beat the oil in gradually. Adding oil slowly lets the egg proteins coat each droplet before more is added. Pouring too fast overwhelms the egg, so the emulsion breaks and the sauce stays runny or separates.

“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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