Home › Sauces, Salads, Pickles and Condiments › Mayonnaise Sauce
Mayonnaise Sauce
For half a pint of sauce, put the yolk of an egg in a basin, with half a tablespoonful of tarragon or other flavored vinegar, and a tablespoonful of pure vinegar, with a little salt and pepper. Mix these thoroughly with a wooden spoon. Then add oil, drop by drop, mixing thoroughly. Never add more until the first is well mixed. When about forty drops are mixed, the quantity added may be a teaspoonful at a time, until four ounces are added. Then taste, and add more vinegar, pepper and salt, if necessary. If you like it, a little eschalot, or onion and parsley, thoroughly mixed, may be added.
A classic hand-whisked mayonnaise, written when the whole point of the instruction was patience. The method still works exactly as printed; only a few of the terms and quantities need translating.
- The hinge: drop by dropThe emulsion is built, not mixed. The first forty drops are where it either takes or breaks, and adding oil faster than the yolk can absorb it is the only real way to fail. Once the base is thick and glossy, the pace can increase safely.
- Yield and ratioHalf a pint (one cup) is optimistic from one yolk and four ounces of oil — that combination gives closer to two-thirds of a cup. A single yolk will in fact carry a full cup of oil if you keep going, so scale the oil up rather than adding a second yolk.
- "Oil" means olive oilIn this period the oil for a mayonnaise was understood to be olive oil, usually a mild one. Modern extra-virgin can turn bitter when worked hard, especially in a machine; a light olive oil, or half olive and half neutral oil, is closer to the intended taste.
- EschalotAn old spelling of shallot. Grate or mince it to a paste before it goes in, or it will sit in coarse specks rather than flavouring the sauce.
- Basin and wooden spoonA basin is any deep mixing bowl. A balloon whisk is faster than a wooden spoon and gives a lighter sauce; a stick blender will do it in a minute, though the drop-by-drop rule still applies at the start.
- TemperatureEverything should be at room temperature. A cold yolk or cold oil straight from the fridge makes the emulsion harder to form and is a common cause of a broken sauce.
- If it splitsStart a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the broken mixture into it a spoonful at a time. Nothing is lost.
- Raw eggThe yolk is never cooked. If you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurised eggs or pasteurised yolks, and keep the finished sauce refrigerated and use it within two or three days.
Mayonnaise reached English and American cookbooks from French practice in the nineteenth century, and its name is still argued over — most often traced to Mahón in Menorca, taken by French forces in 1756, though other accounts derive it from manier, to handle or work. What is clear is that it had become the standard dressing of the fashionable salad course, and books of this kind treated it as a skill test: no whisk-and-hope allowed, but a slow, deliberate build that could be described only in drops. The tarragon vinegar is a period signature — flavoured vinegars were a pantry staple, made at home by steeping herbs, and gave a cook a way to vary a sauce that otherwise had only four ingredients.