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Sauce

Saaoe Mayonnaise Verte

A green mayonnaise sauce made by blending boiled herbs with plain mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Watercress and chervil share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 59 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Saaoe Mayonnaise Verte

Ingredients

Directions

Blanch the herbs

  1. Bring salted water to a boil.

  2. Add parsley, watercress, and chervil; boil for 7 minutes.

  3. Drain and dry the herbs.

Make the sauce

  1. Pound the herbs and pass the pulp through a fine sieve.

  2. Mix the herb pulp into the mayonnaise sauce until it turns a nice apple green.

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. Watercress + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together59 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together774 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Parsley + watercresstop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together469 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Watercress + saucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together295 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Chervil + saucetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together262 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Parsley
Provides the main green flavour and colour of the sauce.
Watercress
Adds colour and a slightly peppery, fresh herbal note.
Chervil
Contributes a delicate, aniseed-like aroma to the herb mix.
Plain mayonnaise sauce
Forms the creamy base that carries the green herb colour and flavour.

The step that matters

Drying the herbs after boiling. Excess water left on the blanched herbs would dilute the mayonnaise and make the sauce thin and watery, so the herbs should be well drained and dried before pounding.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (watercress, chervil, sauce):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against watercress, chervil, sauce. 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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