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Sauce

Tata Cold Sauce

A cold sauce made with raw egg yolks, salad oil, salt, tarragon, and French vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Tarragon and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,547 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Tata Cold Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Place the egg yolks in a round-bottomed bowl set in crushed ice.

  2. Slowly stir in the salad oil with a wooden spoon, adding it sparingly at first.

  3. Add a little salt and continue stirring in the oil carefully.

  4. Incorporate tarragon and French vinegar to taste.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Egg + tarragontop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,789 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  3. Egg + vinegartop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and vinegar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,922 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Emulsify the oil, giving the sauce its thick, creamy body.
Salad oil
Forms the bulk of the sauce, creating a rich, smooth texture when emulsified.
French vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich emulsion.

The step that matters

Adding the oil slowly at first. Oil added too quickly to egg yolks cannot be absorbed into the emulsion and the sauce will break and separate. Adding it sparingly at the start lets the yolk lecithin surround the oil droplets, establishing a stable emulsion before more oil is added.

“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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