Name: Mayonnaise Sauce
Ingredients: 1 hard-boiled egg yolk; 1 raw egg yolk; 2-3 drops of lemon juice or vinegar

Why it works: Egg and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 44,316 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Mayonnaise Sauce

Ingredients

1 hard-boiled egg yolk
1 raw egg yolk
2-3 drops of lemon juice or vinegar

Directions

Pass the hard-boiled egg yolk and raw egg yolk through a wire sieve.
Add 2-3 drops of lemon juice or vinegar.
Whisk until smooth and creamy.

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.

Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

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

Egg yolks: Emulsifying lecithin in the yolks holds oil and liquid together, giving mayonnaise its thick, creamy body.
Lemon juice or vinegar: Adds acidity that brightens flavour and helps keep the emulsion stable.

“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.