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Red or Green Mayonnaise Sauce

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,025 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Red or Green Mayonnaise Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. To make red mayonnaise, mix powdered hard lobster-coral into the mayonnaise sauce.

  2. For green mayonnaise, add finely chopped spinach or parsley to the mayonnaise sauce.

  3. Serve with fish or fish salads.

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. Spinach + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,025 recipes

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

  2. Lobster + saucetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,095 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Sauce + spinachtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together756 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Sauce + parsleytop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,693 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Lobster + spinachtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together67 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

Swap the spinach

The recipe marks spinach as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, sauce, parsley):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, sauce, parsley. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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