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Sauce

Sauce Mayonnaise

A creamy sauce made from egg yolks, salt, cayenne pepper, and salad oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 33% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 50,580 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Sauce Mayonnaise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine the egg yolks, salt, and cayenne pepper in a large bowl.

  2. Stir the mixture well until combined.

Make the mayonnaise

  1. Slowly add the salad oil about 1 teaspoon at a time while stirring continuously until the mixture resembles cream.

  2. Continue adding the oil gradually until you have used nearly 2 cups.

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. Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Egg and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 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
Emulsifier: lecithin in the yolks helps hold the oil and water together in a stable, creamy mixture.
Salad oil
Fat that supplies the body, richness, and thick texture of the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the oil slowly at the start. Oil must be dispersed into tiny droplets around the yolk proteins to form an emulsion. Adding too much oil too quickly overwhelms the yolks, so the mixture can split and fail to thicken. Adding the first teaspoons gradually lets the emulsion establish itself.

“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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