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Colored Mayonnaise
Mayonnaise may be colored green in the following manner: Boil two cups of spinach until tender, drain it, let it cool and squeeze dry. Mash it thoroughly by pounding, adding one spoonful of the mayonnaise, pass the whole through a fine sieve and mix with the dressing. A lighter shade may be obtained by boiling and mashing green peas and using them in the same way. To produce a red tint for a lobster or fish salad, pound the coral of a lobster, pass it through a fine sieve, and add it to the dressing.
A technique rather than a dish: three ways to tint mayonnaise for a cold buffet. The method is sound, and the only real work is getting the colouring agent fine enough that it disappears into the emulsion.
- The hinge: get every drop of water outThe hinge: get the water out — Wet spinach or pea pulp can thin or split a mayonnaise. Squeeze the cooked spinach hard in a towel until it stops weeping, and sieve the pur estreak the sauce.
- Two cups of spinachThe recipe does not say whether the two cups are measured raw or after cooking; taken as raw leaves it reduces to only a few tablespoons of pulp.
- "One spoonful" is a tablespoon"One spoonful" — In recipes of this period an unqualified "spoonful" usually means a tablespoon, tea-spoonfuls being specified as such. Its purpose here is to loosen the paste so it will pass the sieve.
- Pounding, modernisedA mortar was the usual tool for this. A small food processor or an immersion blender in a narrow cup does the same job in seconds, though you should still sieve afterwards.
- Green colour fadesChlorophyll dulls with heat and acid. Cook the spinach briefly, cool it fast, and mix the pur ee in at the last moment; a green mayonnaise made in the morning may look olive by evening.
- Lobster coralThe coral is the roe of a hen lobster, dark greenish-black and soft when raw, turning scarlet and firm only after cooking. If your lobster has none, the tomalley will not substitute — it is green and bitter. Cooked coral pressed through a sieve gives both colour and a strong shellfish flavour, so use it only with fish.
- Raw egg in the baseThe mayonnaise this colours is uncooked. If it will sit out on a buffet, or be served to anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised, build it on pasteurised eggs and keep it under refrigeration.
Coloured mayonnaises belong to the era of the cold table, when a dinner's reputation rested partly on how a dish looked: aspic moulds, chaud-froid glazes, piped borders and sauces tinted to distinguish one platter from the next. The green version is essentially the classical sauce verte of French cookery, usually made with a purée. Butterick's book uses spinach.