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Delmonico's Mayonnaise

A homemade mayonnaise made with egg yolks, olive oil, vinegar, mustard, sugar, salt, pepper, and optional lemon juice.

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 ↓

Delmonico's Mayonnaise

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a soup plate, stir the unbeaten yolks with a silver fork.

  2. Slowly add the olive oil while stirring until the mixture reaches a butter-like consistency.

  3. In a separate bowl, mix the vinegar, salt, mustard, sugar, and pepper.

  4. Gently stir the vinegar mixture into the egg yolk mixture.

  5. If desired, beat the egg whites.

  6. Use lemon juice instead of vinegar.

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. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Olive + mustardtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Emulsify the oil into the mixture and thicken it to a spreadable texture.
Olive oil
Provides the fat that gives mayonnaise its rich, butter-like body.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps keep the emulsion stable.

The step that matters

Adding the olive oil slowly while stirring. Oil added too fast cannot be absorbed by the egg yolk, so the emulsion breaks and the sauce stays runny or separates. Adding it gradually lets tiny droplets become coated and suspended in the yolk.

“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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