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Sauce Mayonnaise-Moreno
Pound four red Spanish sweet peppers in mortar to a fine paste, then press pulp through a sieve on a plate. Prepare a mayonnaise sauce, add sweet pepper puree little by little to sauce, mixing continually while adding it, pour sauce into a saucebowl and serve.
A mayonnaise derivative of the old French repertoire, given in the terse style of a professional kitchen that assumed you already knew how to make the base sauce. Almost everything that can go wrong here is a matter of water and emulsion.
- Add the puree slowly, or the sauce breaksSweet pepper pulp is mostly water, and water dumped into a finished mayonnaise will split it. The instruction to add it "little by little, mixing continually" is the hinge of the recipe; treat the puree as you would the oil in the original emulsion.
- Which peppers"Red Spanish sweet peppers" means pimiento-type peppers, thick-fleshed and mild, not paprika pods and not anything hot. Jarred piquillo or roasted pimiento peppers, thoroughly drained and patted dry, are the closest modern equivalent and are already soft enough to puree.
- Mortar and sieveA small food processor or blender replaces the mortar, but do not skip the sieve. The point of pressing through it is to leave skin and fibre behind so the finished sauce stays glossy rather than flecked and grainy.
- Reduce the water firstIf the peppers are watery, spread the sieved pulp in a small pan and cook it down gently until it is thick as tomato paste, then cool it completely. Warm puree will loosen mayonnaise as surely as wet puree will.
- ProportionThe original gives no quantity for the mayonnaise, and none for the finished sauce. Four fleshy peppers will yield anywhere from a third of a cup to a cup of sieved pulp depending on their size, so add it gradually and stop when the colour and flavour suit: less puree gives a pale rose sauce, more a deeper coral.
- SeasoningPepper pulp is sweet and flat on its own. Correct the finished sauce with salt and a little lemon juice or sherry vinegar, tasting as you go, since the added bulk dilutes whatever seasoning the base mayonnaise carried.
- Raw yolkA hand-made mayonnaise is uncooked. If it is going to sit on a buffet or be served to anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, use pasteurized eggs, and keep the sauce refrigerated until it goes to table.
- ServingThis is a cold sauce, sent out in a sauceboat rather than spooned over. It belongs with cold shellfish, poached fish, cold chicken or hard-boiled eggs, and it will keep two or three days covered in the refrigerator.
The International Cook Book came out of the world of professional restaurant and hotel cookery, where a kitchen kept a single large batch of mayonnaise and spun off a dozen named children from it by stirring in one flavouring apiece: tomato and pimiento for andalouse, herbs for verte, mustard for remoulade. "Moreno" is Spanish for dark or dark-complexioned, and names of this kind were handed out freely in nineteenth-century French service, sometimes for a guest, sometimes for a place, sometimes simply because the sauce came out a deeper colour than its parent; the specific origin here is not documented. The Spanish sweet pepper itself is the pimiento, a New World fruit that had been naturalised in Spain for centuries by the time this book was printed and was arriving in American kitchens mainly in cans.