Home › Salads › White Mayonnaise
White Mayonnaise
1/2 cup veal jelly 1 cup oil 6 tablespoons tarragon vinegar 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon white pepper 1/2 teaspoon powdered sugar Dust of cayenne Set a bowl into a dish of cracked ice; pour the jelly into the bowl and whip to a stiff froth, add seasonings, then, a drop at a time, add the oil, beating constantly and alternating with vinegar. The sauce should be stiff enough to keep its form when dropped from a spoon.
An egg-free cold sauce set with gelatin rather than yolk — closer to a chaud-froid than to modern mayonnaise. Everything depends on keeping it cold.
- Veal jellyThis is reduced veal stock, chilled until it sets firm from the natural gelatin in the bones. Modern boxed stock will not gel; simmer veal or beef bones for several hours and reduce, or soften 1 teaspoon of unflavored powdered gelatin in 1/2 cup of good cold stock and warm it just enough to dissolve before chilling.
- The hinge is temperatureThe bowl must sit in cracked ice throughout. The jelly has to stay cold enough to hold air and support the oil; if it warms and slackens, the emulsion breaks and no amount of beating will bring it back. Chill the oil and vinegar too.
- Whipping the jellyBreak the set jelly up with a fork first, then whip. It should go opaque and increase considerably in volume, like a loose meringue — that froth, not an egg yolk, is what carries the oil.
- Oil, drop by dropTake this literally for the first third of the cup. A gelatin emulsion is less forgiving than an egg one. Alternating with the vinegar as directed also helps: each addition of acid thins the base slightly and gives the next oil somewhere to go.
- Tarragon vinegarWhite wine vinegar steeped with a few tarragon sprigs for a week, or the commercial bottling. Six tablespoons to one cup of oil is sharp by modern taste; start with four and add the rest at the end if you want it.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term usually meant finely ground granulated sugar rather than modern confectioners' sugar, which contains cornstarch. Superfine granulated dissolves just as well in the cold mixture and is the better choice here.
- Yield and keepingAround 2 cups, more once whipped. It will set solid in the refrigerator; let it stand ten minutes and whisk briefly to bring it back to spooning consistency. Being stock-based, treat it as you would any cooked meat dish and use it within two days.
- How it was usedSpoon or pipe it over cold poached chicken, veal, salmon or hard-boiled eggs, where it holds its shape on the plate in a way egg mayonnaise will not. It is not a dressing to toss greens in.
In cookbooks of this period "mayonnaise" covered a wider family of cold sauces than it does now, and a white version made without yolks belonged to the same tradition as chaud-froid — the gelatin-set coatings that professional kitchens used to mask cold meats and fish for buffet service. Veal jelly was a natural thickener, being a by-product of stock made from a knuckle of veal. The technique also solved a practical problem: an egg mayonnaise slides off cold chicken, while a gelatin-bound one sets in place and can be trimmed and decorated. Its appearance in a promotional cookbook is a reminder that these books were aiming at the ambitious home cook as much as the everyday one, sitting a semi-professional garnishing sauce a few pages from the plainest boiled dressing.