Delmonico uses four yolks of eggs for two quart-bottles of oil. It is only necessary, then, to use one yolk for a pint of oil, the egg only being a foundation for the sauce. It is easier, however, to begin with more yolks: many use three of them for a gill of oil. The sauce will not curdle so easily if the few drops of vinegar are used at first, after a very little oil is used. It keeps perfectly well by putting it into a glass preserve or pickle bottle, with a ground-glass stopper. It is well to have enough made to last a week at least. The opportunity of making it may be taken, and adding it to the _Mayonnaise_ bottle, when there are extra yolks left, after the whites of the eggs are used for other purposes, such as white cake, corn-starch pudding, etc.
It requires about a quarter of an hour to make this sauce. In summer, the process of making it is greatly facilitated by placing the eggs and oil in the ice-chest half an hour before using them. Sometimes, for the sake of a change, the _Mayonnaise_ sauce is made green. It is then called
Here is Carême’s receipt for it: “Take a good handful of chervil, together with some tarragon, and a few cives. When these herbs have been washed, put them into boiling water for five or six minutes, with a little salt; after which, cool, drain, and squeeze them dry. Pound them well, adding a spoonful of _Mayonnaise_ sauce; then pass the whole through a sieve, and mix with the _Mayonnaise_ sauce. If you find it too pale a green, add a little spinach prepared in the same way.”
It is more convenient and simple to add boiled and mashed green pease to the sauce for coloring. The green _Mayonnaise_ is sometimes used to spread over a cold boiled fish (marinated). The dish is garnished with lettuce heads. Sometimes, for lobster or fish salads, the _Mayonnaise_ sauce is prepared red.
Pound some lobster coral, pass it through a sieve, and mix it with the _Mayonnaise_ sauce.
Ingredients: One table-spoonful of vinegar, three table-spoonfuls of olive-oil, one salt-spoonful of pepper, one salt-spoonful of salt, one even tea-spoonful of onion scraped fine. Many use tarragon vinegar, _i. e._, vinegar in which tarragon has been soaked.
Pour the oil, mixed with the pepper and salt, over the salad; mix them together; then add the vinegar and mix again. Chaptal says: “It results, from this process, that there can never be too much vinegar: from the specific gravity of the vinegar compared with the oil, what is more than needful will fall to the bottom of the salad-bowl. The salt should not be dissolved in the vinegar, but in the oil, by which means it is more equally distributed through the salad.”