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Sauce

Cold Mousseline Sauce

A chilled sauce made from cream, mayonnaise, and spinach or watercress, served with salmon or fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and spinach are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,130 recipes. Both carry octanal, which smells fat, soap. The science ↓

Cold Mousseline Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the green puree

  1. Rinse and pound the spinach or watercress.

  2. Rub the greens through a fine sieve to create a puree.

Make the sauce

  1. Whip the cream until soft peaks form.

  2. Stir the mayonnaise and green puree into the whipped cream.

  3. Serve with salmon or fish.

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. Cream + spinachtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream
Whipped to soft peaks, it lightens the sauce and gives it a airy, mousse-like texture.
Mayonnaise
Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce body and a smooth, creamy mouthfeel.
Spinach or watercress
Provides the green colour and a fresh, herbal flavour once pureed.

The step that matters

Whip the cream until soft peaks form. Overwhipping cream past soft peaks makes it grainy and can turn it to butter, while underwhipping leaves the sauce thin and less airy. Stopping at soft peaks keeps the mousseline light and smooth when the other ingredients are folded in.

“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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