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Sauce Remoulade

A creamy sauce made from hard‑boiled egg yolks, mustard, vinegar, and olive oil, seasoned with salt and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 901 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

Sauce Remoulade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the yolks

  1. Boil the eggs until hard, then cool and remove the shells.

  2. Set aside the egg whites to use as a garnish, and place the yolks in a bowl.

Make the sauce

  1. Mash the yolks until smooth, then add mustard, salt, cayenne, and half of the vinegar; mix thoroughly.

  2. Slowly add the olive oil drop by drop while stirring continuously.

  3. Incorporate the raw egg yolk, then add the remaining vinegar and mix well.

Serve

  1. Use the sauce with cold meat, fish, or salad, stirring carefully to prevent curdling.

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. Mustard + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together901 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  2. Pepper + tarragontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mustard + olivetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard-boiled eggs
Yolks mash into a smooth base that gives the sauce body and richness.
Raw egg yolk
Its lecithin helps emulsify the oil, holding the sauce together and making it creamy.
Olive oil
Forms the emulsified fat that gives the sauce its silky, rich texture.
Made mustard
Its emulsifiers help stabilise the oil and yolk mixture so it does not separate.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and balances the richness of the oil.

The step that matters

Adding the olive oil. Oil must be added drop by drop while stirring so the emulsion forms. Adding it too fast lets the oil separate out, and the sauce breaks and looks curdled.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, pepper, tarragon, vinegar, olive):

  1. Capsicumfits about as well
  2. Mustardthe original
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Lettucefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, pepper, tarragon, vinegar, olive. 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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