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Green Mayonnaise Dressing
Mix enough spinach green with mayonnaise dressing to give it a bright color; a little finely chopped parsley can be added.
This is a variation rather than a standalone formula: it assumes you already have a bowl of mayonnaise and know how to make the green colouring that 1900 cooks kept on hand. The whole thing hinges on that colouring.
- What "spinach green" isNot chopped spinach. It is the classic French vert d'épinards: raw spinach leaves pounded or blitzed with a spoonful of water, the juice squeezed through muslin, then warmed gently until the green solids coagulate and can be strained off as a paste. That paste is the pigment.
- Never let it boilBring the spinach juice only to the point where the green solids set, well short of a simmer, and pull it off at once. A rolling boil turns the pigment olive-brown and the dressing comes out the colour of pond water rather than "bright."
- QuantitiesThe original gives none. Work with a good handful of spinach and expect only a small quantity of paste from it. Beat it into the mayonnaise a little at a time and stop when the colour pleases you; too much pulp thins the emulsion and tastes grassy.
- A modern shortcutBlanching a handful of spinach and a few parsley sprigs for 30 seconds, shocking them in ice water, then puréeing with a spoonful of the mayonnaise gives much the same effect in a blender. Squeeze the greens hard first or the water will break the sauce.
- ParsleyChop it as finely as the original says and add it at the end. Flat-leaf parsley is generally the more strongly flavoured of the two.
- TimingThe colour dulls quickly. Mix it the day you serve it and keep it cold and covered.
- Raw eggThe mayonnaise this is built on is uncooked. If serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurised eggs or a commercial mayonnaise as the base.
- ServingGreen mayonnaise was conventionally served with cold fish, hard-boiled eggs and lobster rather than with leaf salads, though this entry says nothing about how it was to be used.
Green mayonnaise belongs to the French repertoire of tinted cold sauces that American cookbooks took up in the later nineteenth century, when a formal table was judged partly on colour: pink from lobster coral or beet, yellow from egg yolk, green from spinach. Escoffier's sauce verte is the same idea worked up further, with watercress, chervil, tarragon and parsley blanched and pounded together. That the Twentieth Century Cook Book gives the instruction in a single sentence suggests the underlying technique was still assumed knowledge in a household kitchen — the author expected a reader who knew what "spinach green" meant.