No. 614

Mayonnaise Sauce with Fruit Jelly

Sauce Mayonnaise a la Gelee de Fruits

Break four raw egg-yolks into a vessel; mix in with them two tablespoonfuls of water, salt and a little white and red pepper, stir well and incorporate slowly, especially at first, one quart of sweet oil and eight spoonfuls of vinegar at different intervals. To make the fruit jelly mayonnaise, add for one pint of mayonnaise sauce (No. 606), one spoonful of English mustard, and a quarter of a pound either of currant, grape, apple, quince or cranberry jelly.

← No. 613 Mayonnaise Sauce with Jelly and Jellied Cold Sauces No. 615 Mayonnaise Mousseline Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

Two recipes in one entry: the base mayonnaise, then the fruit-jelly variation built on it. The base is a large batch by modern standards, and the jelly version is essentially a sweet-sharp sauce for cold meat and game rather than a salad dressing.

The hinge: add the oil slowly at the startFour yolks will carry a full quart of oil, but only if the emulsion is established first. The first half-cup should go in drop by drop with constant stirring; after that the stream can widen. If it breaks, start a fresh yolk in a clean bowl and beat the split sauce into it a spoonful at a time.
"Sweet oil"Nineteenth-century shorthand for fresh, mild olive oil, sweet meaning not rancid rather than sugared. A light olive oil or a neutral oil gives the closest result; a robust modern extra-virgin will turn bitter under heavy whisking.
SpoonfulsRanhofer's "spoonful" is usually taken as a tablespoon, though this recipe uses "tablespoonfuls" and "spoonfuls" in the same sentence, so the eight spoonfuls of vinegar may be somewhat less than the half-cup that reading gives. Add it in stages as directed, both to season and to thin the sauce as it stiffens with oil.
Scale it downA quart of oil yields roughly five cups of mayonnaise, a restaurant quantity. One yolk, a rounded half-tablespoon of water, a cup of oil and two tablespoons of vinegar gives about a cup at roughly the same proportions.
English mustardDry English mustard powder, hot and pungent, not the mild yellow prepared kind. If using it from the tin, mix the spoonful with a little water and let it stand ten minutes to develop before stirring it in.
The jellyA quarter pound is about a third of a cup of firm jelly. Beat it smooth first, or warm it just enough to loosen, then fold it into the pint of mayonnaise; adding it stiff and cold tends to break the emulsion into lumps.
Raw eggsThe sauce is never heated. Use the freshest eggs available, or pasteurized ones if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, and keep it refrigerated and use it within a day or two.
ServingThis belongs with cold roast game, duck, ham, tongue or a galantine, where the currant or cranberry jelly does the work a Cumberland sauce would. It is too sweet for a green salad.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for some thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is the working record of that restaurant: over a thousand pages arranged by department, with cold sauces numbered in a block so that a cook could be sent from one to the next. The neighbouring entries in this stretch are largely mayonnaise variations, which is why this one gives a base formula and then a two-line amendment. The pairing of red fruit jelly with mustard and cold roast meat is older than the mayonnaise it is folded into here; English kitchens had long served currant jelly with venison and game, and the same instinct lies behind Cumberland sauce, which appears in the later nineteenth century. Mayonnaise itself is generally traced to the Balearic port of Mah on in the mid-eighteenth century, though the derivation is traditional rather than documented, and French cooks had argued over the spelling long before Ranhofer wrote.