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Cream and Butter Mayonnaise

A mayonnaise made with egg yolks, sugar, cayenne pepper, vinegar, butter, lemon juice, salt, and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Cream and Butter Mayonnaise

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Beat the yolks of the eggs until light.

  2. Add sugar and cayenne pepper, then beat until smooth.

Cook and finish

  1. Heat vinegar and butter until hot.

  2. Slowly stir the hot mixture into the egg yolks until thickened.

  3. Let cool, then add salt, lemon juice, and whipped cream until desired consistency.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

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

  5. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Emulsify and thicken the sauce as they set with gentle heat.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that gives the sauce a smooth, creamy body.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens flavor and helps balance the richness of the butter.
Whipped cream
Lightens the texture and adds softness to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Slowly stir the hot mixture into the egg yolks. Adding hot liquid to yolks too quickly can scramble them. Pouring slowly while stirring warms the yolks gradually so they thicken smoothly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Strawberryfits about as well
  3. Vanillafits less well
  4. Figfits less well

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