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Sauce Piquante for Cold Meat, Game, Poultry, Fish, or Salads

A piquant sauce made from hard‑boiled egg yolks, mustard, pepper, salt, salad oil, vinegar, and optional ingredients.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Sauce Piquante for Cold Meat, Game, Poultry, Fish, or Salads

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pound the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs in a mortar.

  2. Add the mustard, pepper, and salt, and mix well.

  3. Stir in the salad oil and then the vinegar until smooth.

  4. Pass the mixture through a sieve.

  5. For added flavor, mix in any optional ingredients as desired.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Walnut + parsleytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together865 recipes

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

  3. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mustard + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,588 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Mustard + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together849 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard-boiled egg yolks
Provide the rich base that thickens and emulsifies the sauce.
Made mustard
Adds sharp flavor and helps hold the oil and vinegar together.
Salad oil
Supplies fat that gives the sauce a smooth, creamy texture.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the rich fat.

The step that matters

Stir in the salad oil and then the vinegar until smooth. Oil must be incorporated gradually into the yolk and mustard mixture so it emulsifies. Adding it too fast or all at once can cause it to separate and leave the sauce greasy rather than smooth.

Swap the walnut

The recipe marks walnut as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, mustard, pepper, vinegar, anchovy, mushroom, parsley):

  1. Beansfits about as well
  2. Chickpeafits about as well
  3. Walnutthe original
  4. Chestnutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, mustard, pepper, vinegar, anchovy, mushroom, parsley. 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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