Skip to main content
Sauce

Green Mayonnaise Sauce

A green mayonnaise sauce made by mixing finely minced herbs into mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Chervil and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 824 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Green Mayonnaise Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Finely mince the chervil, garden cress, tarragon, and burnet.

  2. Mix the minced herbs together.

  3. Stir the herb mixture into the mayonnaise sauce.

  4. If using tarragon vinegar, do not add tarragon to the herb mixture.

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. Chervil + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together824 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Chervil + garden cresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Garden cress + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together23 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Tarragon + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Garden cress + vinegartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together31 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Chervil
Adds a fresh, delicate herb aroma and flavor to the sauce.
Garden cress
Adds a peppery, fresh flavor and bright green colour.
Tarragon
Adds a distinctive aniseed-like aroma that defines the sauce's flavor.
Burnet
Adds a light, cucumber-like freshness and more green colour.
Mayonnaise sauce
Provides the creamy, fatty base that carries the herb flavors and gives body.

The step that matters

Stir the herb mixture into the mayonnaise sauce. Mayonnaise is an emulsion of oil and egg. Folding the herbs in gently, rather than beating hard, keeps the emulsion intact so the sauce stays smooth and does not turn thin or grainy.

Swap the tarragon

The recipe marks tarragon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chervil, garden cress, sauce, vinegar):

  1. Capersfits about as well
  2. Tarragonthe original
  3. Parsleyfits less well
  4. Marjoramfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against chervil, garden cress, sauce, vinegar. 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.

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes