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Cream or White Mayonnaise
This may be made with sweet or sour cream; if the former, having the cream whipped and adding in equal quantity to mayonnaise already prepared. Sour thick cream may be substituted, or whipped white of egg. This may be coloured green with spinach juice or pink with berrysyrup or cordials or with cochineal or maraschino.
A finishing sauce rather than a standalone preparation: it assumes you already have a bowl of mayonnaise and want it lighter, paler and sweeter for fruit. The whole thing turns on folding, not stirring.
- Sweet cream means unsoured"Sweet cream" is simply plain cream, as opposed to soured — not sweetened. Use heavy or double cream, whipped to soft peaks so it still folds in without breaking the emulsion.
- Sour thick creamThe nearest modern equivalents are crème fraîche or full-fat sour cream, both of which can be used unwhipped. Avoid low-fat sour cream; the added stabilisers and water make the sauce slack.
- Proportions"Equal quantity" is not specified as weight or volume; volume of whipped cream to volume of mayonnaise is the usual reading, and a cup of each gives roughly two cups of sauce. Fold in thirds with a spatula and stop as soon as the streaks disappear.
- TimingCream-lightened mayonnaise can weep or separate on standing, so it is best made shortly before serving and kept cold.
- Whipped egg whiteThe egg-white version is likely the least stable of the three. It also leaves you with uncooked white in a sauce that is never heated; use pasteurised eggs, or pasteurised-egg mayonnaise as the base, if serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised.
- CochinealStill sold, now labelled carmine or E120 on ingredient lists, and derived from scale insects — worth knowing if you cook for vegetarians. A few drops of beet juice or a raspberry reduction does the same job.
- Spinach juice for greenBlitz a handful of raw spinach with a spoonful of water and strain through muslin.
- MaraschinoIn this period this meant the cherry liqueur, not the syrup from a jar of neon cherries. Add it a little at a time; too much will thin the sauce.
Mayonnaise softened with whipped cream belongs to the late nineteenth-century vogue for fruit salads dressed as though they were savoury courses, a fashion that produced everything from Waldorf salad to the moulded fruit-and-mayonnaise constructions of the following decades. Lightening a cold sauce with cream and tinting it in pastels is recorded in the professional kitchens of the era, though how widespread the practice was is harder to say; a single base sauce was often expected to yield a run of variations under different names, and the coloured versions here — green, pink, and the liqueur-scented one — are the same idea. The colouring agents themselves are a fair snapshot of what a cook had to hand before commercial food dyes were cheap and reliable: vegetable juice, fruit syrup, insect-derived carmine, and a bottle of cordial.