Home › The World's Kitchen › Fennel Sauce
Fennel Sauce
Prepare a mayonnaise sauce adding half teaspoon finely chopped fennel, mix well with a wooden spoon one minute, then serve as required.
A one-line derivative sauce of the kind that fills the back pages of professional cookbooks: the base is assumed, and only the variation is written down. A few things need filling in before it works at a modern bench.
- How much mayonnaiseThe original gives no quantity. Half a teaspoon of chopped fennel suits roughly one cup (240 ml) of mayonnaise; scale the herb with the base rather than the other way round.
- Which fennelThis means the feathery green fronds of the herb, chopped fine, not the sliced bulb of Florence fennel and not the dried seed. Fronds from a supermarket bulb work well; dill is the usual stand-in but tastes different.
- The wooden spoonThe original specifies wood, as most sauce work of the period does. The practical point is gentle stirring rather than the material: fold the herb in without whipping air into the emulsion. A minute is all the recipe asks for.
- Let it sitChopped fennel needs a little time to carry into the fat, so a short rest in the refrigerator before serving may help, though the original simply says to serve as required.
- Raw yolkA scratch mayonnaise is uncooked egg. If serving to anyone elderly, pregnant or immunocompromised, use pasteurised eggs or a commercial mayonnaise as the base.
- What to serve it withA cold fish sauce, in the period sense: poached salmon, mackerel, cold crab or a plate of cold boiled potatoes.
Fennel and fish is one of the oldest fixed pairings in English and northern European cooking — fennel sauce with mackerel appears in cookbooks for centuries before this one, usually as chopped fennel stirred into melted butter or a flour-thickened white sauce, served hot. Here the herb is folded into cold mayonnaise instead, so that the sauce can be portioned from a bowl without further cooking — which is presumably why the recipe assumes you already have the mayonnaise standing by.