No. 606

Mayonnaise Sauce

Sauce Mayonnaise

In order to obtain a quick and certain mayonnaise sauce. it must be worked simply with a small wire whisk. Put five egg-yolks into a bowl suppressing every particle of the white, add some salt, white or red pepper, and ground mustard; after these are thoroughly mixed pour in slowly a quart of sweet oil and one gill of vinegar, alternating them without once stopping to work vigorously. In a few minutes the sauce becomes voluminous, consistent, smooth and firm.

← No. 605 Horseradish and Cream Sauce, and with Oil Cold Sauces No. 607 Mayonnaise Sauce a la Bayonnaise →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's method is sound, and the proportions still work — but a quart of oil at once will test both your arm and the emulsion. A few notes on the units and the mechanics.

The hinge: oil goes in slowlyThe recipe says pour it in slowly and never stop working, and that is the whole recipe. For the first half cup, add the oil a few drops at a time until the mixture visibly thickens; after that you can move to a thin steady stream. Everything else is seasoning.
A gill of vinegarOne gill is half a cup. Alternating it with the oil is deliberate — the acid and its water thin the emulsion just enough to keep it from seizing as it stiffens.
Scale and yieldA quart of oil, five yolks and half a cup of vinegar makes roughly five cups of sauce, enough for a banquet service. Quartered — one yolk, one cup of oil, two tablespoons of vinegar — it behaves identically and fits a home bowl.
Oil per yolkA single yolk will carry about a cup of oil comfortably and rather more at a stretch, so five yolks to a quart — about four-fifths of a cup each — sits within a workable range. If you want extra margin, use six yolks.
"Sweet oil"Nineteenth-century kitchen shorthand for mild edible olive oil, not a sweetened product. A light olive oil or a neutral oil gives the flavor Ranhofer intended; strong extra-virgin oil turns bitter under hard whisking.
TemperatureBowl, yolks and oil all at room temperature. Cold yolks straight from the refrigerator are a common cause of a mayonnaise that will not take.
If it breaksStart a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and whisk the split mixture into it slowly, as if it were the oil. Nothing is lost.
Raw yolksThis is uncooked egg, and it stays uncooked. Use pasteurized eggs if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, keep the sauce refrigerated, and use it within a few days rather than the week or more a commercial jar allows.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for most of three decades, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working repertoire set down in print — hence the numbered entries and the cross-references to variations like the Mayonnaise à la Bayonnaise that follows. The sauce itself had been codified in French professional cooking earlier in the century; Carême wrote about it, and the origin of the name has never been settled, with the two most repeated explanations being the Spanish port of Mahón, taken by the French in 1756, and the old French moyeu, meaning egg yolk. What dates Ranhofer's entry is the insistence on the small wire whisk: he is arguing, in a period when period recipes still commonly directed a wooden spoon in a mortar or bowl, that the whisk makes the emulsion faster and more reliably — the same case a modern cook makes for the food processor.