Is There a Nutmeg in the House? (21 page)

It may be worth making the point that it’s not easy to appreciate what well-made quiches are like today unless you go to Lorraine and eat them on the spot. The pastry is always very thin; it’s always baked in shallow tart tins; the filling is always composed of eggs and cream; it never contains Gruyère or Parmesan cheese; and usually there’s a small amount of streaky bacon – another local product – in small pieces.

In the villages of the Vosges you may discover older versions without the bacon but with plain, fresh, skimmed-milk curd cheese mixed with the cream and eggs. I suppose someone might even consider reviving the ancient bread dough version. I’m told they still make one in some parts of Alsace. It’s rectangular, and as the bread dough bakes in a very hot oven its dressing of fresh curds and cream integrates with its base and appears as inviting as the bronzed and blistered quiche of André Theuriet’s childhood. In Alsace it’s called
Flammen Kuchen
or tarte à la flamme, it’s eaten bubbling hot, and with it, of course, you drink a cool aromatic local white wine.

Tatler
, September 1985

Hand-made Mayonnaise

Those who make their mayonnaise in the electric blender will perhaps think it very quaint that anyone should still use the old method of stirring by hand. In some ways I would agree. The electric blender has, after all, revolutionised our cooking lives during the past three decades, and it is only sensible to take every possible advantage of its labour-saving benefits. I would certainly, for example, use the blender when making a mayonnaise in large quantity. Given time, however, I still take pleasure in settling down to make this extraordinary sauce by the old method which to many people now seems laborious. The following notes, therefore, are concerned mainly with hand-made mayonnaise. They may prove useful to those who already know the theory but still find the practice tricky – and there are, I think, many young people today who prefer hand-made to mechanical methods; there are even people who don’t possess or can’t be bothered with electric blenders and mixers.

1. The fresher your egg or eggs, the easier and quicker it will be to achieve a mayonnaise of the right consistency. Just what this should be is fully described in note 5 below.

2. If you use an olive oil of good quality with a delicate and true taste of the fruit, mayonnaise needs no seasoning other than lemon juice or a very little wine vinegar. With rare exceptions, as for example when destined for a celeriac salad, mustard is ruination to mayonnaise. Pepper is redundant, and surprisingly so is salt, although that is no doubt a matter of taste. Strong condiments are needed only for mayonnaise made with totally tasteless oil. Even then they should be used very sparingly indeed. In a mayonnaise all seasonings and flavourings are much intensified. Overdone, they produce a sauce approaching perilously near the bottled stuff.

3. Before starting on a mayonnaise, make certain that eggs and oil are both at room temperature. There is no surer way of curdling the sauce than by using ice-cold ingredients, or an ice-cold with a warm one. So if you store your eggs in the refrigerator, remember to take out however many you need in good time. If you have forgotten this precaution, put your egg or eggs in a bowl of warm water for a few minutes before you start work on the sauce. As
for the oil, it would be absurd to refrigerate it, and my advice is don’t. Instead, keep it at a moderate and constant temperature.

4. The fewer eggs you can manage with, the better the mayon naise. Beginners may need the reassurance of using two yolks for a small amount of sauce, but with experience most people discover that one large yolk will serve to thicken up to 300 ml (½ pint) of oil and often more. Much depends on the quality of both ingredients. And, again, a fresh egg with a good plump yolk works twice as fast as a stale flat one and goes much further.

5. The solid, jelly-like consistency of a true mayonnaise does, of course, take a little longer to achieve by hand than in the blender. Some people never do achieve it, because – lacking faith perhaps – they give up before the stage of maximum absorption and expansion has been reached, thus producing a pouring sauce rather than the emulsified ointment-like substance that a mayonnaise should be. This was very graphically defined in a recipe I came across recently in Cassell’s
Book of the Household
, published in 1889, as being ‘quite as thick as a pat of butter on a hot day in August. Indeed it would stand up in a tablespoon, so that you could put three or four tablespoons in one spoon at a time, and hold it up in the air and it would not run over.’

The thickening and expanding process starts only when the egg has absorbed a certain quantity of oil, and at this stage the beginner has to have faith and patience. Quite suddenly you find that the sauce has changed from a thick cream into a smooth, shining ointment. From there you persevere until the ointment is so thick and stiff that it is quite difficult to stir in more oil.

6. Experienced mayonnaise-makers tend to plop oil straight from the bottle, not worrying too much about that drop-by-drop business – except for the first minute or two – but probably the most satisfactory and the simplest method is to use a measuring jug. Any jug with a good pouring spout will do – if it is a bad one you waste a lot of oil – and some kitchen shops probably still stock glass oil pourers imported from Spain. These are very effective, and although they slow up the process rather, do give a feeling of safety to the beginner.

7. Separating the eggs is such a basic kitchen operation that it is surprising to find that people are actually frightened of it. Indeed special gadgets have been invented to help the nervous and the inexperienced. In this respect, the best gadget I know is a good fresh egg. Give it a sharp, decisive tap – in the centre – on the rim
of the bowl waiting to receive the white. Passing the egg from one half shell to the other, let the white fall into the bowl, giving it a bit of assistance with the shell. The shell can also be used to scoop out any scrap of yolk which has found its way into the white, but with a really fresh egg this doesn’t happen, and it hardly takes more than five seconds to separate the egg. For mayonnaise, by the way, it doesn’t matter if a little of the white gets into the bowl with the yolk. It can happen, of course, that a stale egg, on being cracked, falls plop into the bowl and cannot thereafter be separated, so you have to start again with another egg. Or give up the whole enterprise and resort to the blender which obligingly makes mayonnaise from the whole egg. It won’t make a very good one though, not with a stale, flat egg.

8. The bowl you use for making mayonnaise should be a fairly solid one, one which does not slide about the table as you stir, and if it is wide in proportion to its depth, so much the better. It will be easier to stir the mixture as it thickens. Professional chefs tend to use a balloon whisk for mayonnaise, so they also need a rather large, deep bowl. Old-fashioned home cooks often used to beat the oil into the egg with a fork. Personally I use a tough little boxwood spoon with a rather long handle. It’s a question of finding out what suits you best.

9. I find that adding the oil to the egg drop by drop is necessary only in the very early stages, until yolk and oil are securely amalgamated. After that you can plop it in in quite large spoonfuls. The important thing is to stir very firmly after each addition and to wait until the oil is properly integrated before adding more. The stirring or beating must take in
all
the sauce, from the bottom of the bowl and round the sides as well as the top surface. As the sauce thickens and its volume increases, the oil can be added, if you like, in a steady thin stream. On the whole, though, I find it easier to continue with the system of alternately adding and stirring, a system which creates its own rhythm. Every now and again stir in a little lemon juice. Quite quickly, if all has gone well, the mayonnaise becomes so stiff that it is quite difficult to stir. If you think you have enough, stop now. Taste the mayonnaise, add more lemon juice or a few drops of vinegar if necessary. (Careful about the vinegar though. Nothing is easier than to wreck the entire batch of mayonnaise by the careless addition of vinegar. So measure it out into a teaspoon.) If, however, you still need more, you will find that you can go on incorporating oil for quite a long
time after the final stage appears to have been reached, and certainly for long after your arm has started to ache. 300 ml (½ pint) of oil per egg yolk seems to me about the right proportion, but you could use much more. The stories you hear about people making a washbasin-size bowl of mayonnaise based on a single egg yolk are not just myths. Given the rarity, though, and the huge cost of good olive oil, it would be a bit reckless to use more than you need just for the sake of a dare, or because you find the process so mesmerising you can’t stop the pouring and stirring.

A very important point remains to be made: one of the major troubles about mayonnaise is that when it’s good there is seldom quite enough. So don’t stop before you are sure there really
is
enough. But be cautious once you have passed the half-pint-to-one-egg level.

10. If you have a mishap and the sauce does separate, the remedy is to start again with a fresh egg yolk in a clean bowl. Add the curdled sauce a little at a time to the new egg. It will soon thicken and solidify.

11. Once your mayonnaise is soundly and securely integrated, it takes really careless treatment to spoil it.

12. If you need to keep the mayonnaise overnight, possibly the most effective way is to cover the whole surface with, first, a thin film of oil, then with a piece of plastic wrap. Store it in a cool place – say about 15°C/60°F – but not in the refrigerator. (Mayonnaise doesn’t like extremes of temperature either way.) The idea of the sealing film of oil is to exclude the air and prevent the formation of a skin which often causes the downfall of the sauce. When the time comes to serve it, simply stir in the oil in the routine way and all should be well. I find this method a very useful one. Another way is to stir a tablespoon of boiling water into the mayonnaise when it is ready. This stabilises it, but does thin it very slightly. To some people this is an advantage, and it does make the sauce go further. So much depends upon what it is to accompany.

13. That last sentence brings me to the olive oil itself. I have deliberately left it to the end of these notes. Olive oil addicts and connoisseurs will have their own views and preferences and experience to draw on. They will also, no doubt, have their own sources of supply. Good and authentic olive oil is now so rare and so expensive that advice to use a heavily fruity, green, first-pressing Tuscan or Italian Riviera oil, or a slightly more refined and subtle golden oil from Provence for a mayonnaise to go with
this or that or the other given dish is about as meaningful as telling people that a Chambolle-Musigny 1967 might be better with the pheasant and chestnuts than a Romanée-Conti 1964.

So from my own experience, and for the benefit of the few who are interested enough to search out, and both able and willing to pay for, supplies of good olive oils, I’d say it is by no means essential to use a particularly fruity olive oil for mayonnaise, although I do have to say again that it does depend upon what food the sauce is to go with. For coarse white fish, for example, a fruity oil is an advantage. For salmon trout or a delicate poached chicken I use a milder Provence oil. For salmon, which has its own richness, I’d also use a mild oil, or perhaps equal quantities of a fruity oil and a refined, light and fairly tasteless one of a reliable and uniform quality. To the inexperienced I should add a warning about olive oils blended with other oils, usually corn or sunflower seed oil. Not so long ago, in a friend’s house, I made a mayonnaise with this type of oil. I came to the conclusion that the blend must have been in the proportion of a quart of sunflower to an ounce of olive oil. A waste of the olive oil, in fact. It must be remembered that in a mayonnaise the taste of the oil is much intensified. Consequently the flavour of the mayonnaise I made with the blended oil was solely of sunflower seed. No amount of extra seasoning in the form of mustard, lemon juice, salt, pepper, could make it edible.

14. Finally, a method of making mayonnaise using one raw and one hard-boiled egg yolk. This combination makes the basis of the modern sauce rémoulade, in other words a thick mayonnaise to which chopped herbs, capers, and sometimes anchovies are added. But there’s no reason why the basic sauce shouldn’t be regarded just as a mayonnaise which is amazingly good tempered, and one which in my experience it is almost impossible to curdle. It’s a bit creamier than an ordinary mayonnaise, but particularly useful when you have to make the sauce in advance and keep it overnight.

All you need to do is extract the yolk from a not-too-hard-boiled egg, mash it to a paste in a bowl, stir in the raw yolk, and when the two are thoroughly blended start adding the oil. Proceed as usual, adding lemon juice or a few drops of vinegar from time to time as the sauce thickens. You need stop only when you think you have enough sauce, or when your arm aches too much to continue, whichever is the soonest. Cover, as before, with a thin
film of oil and then with plastic wrap. Leave in a cool place, but not in the refrigerator.

If you are intending to treat the sauce as a rémoulade rather than as straight mayonnaise, add the rémoulade part about an hour before serving. In their simplest form the flavourings consist of a teaspoon each of rinsed, carefully drained, and chopped capers, chopped fresh tarragon, and chopped fresh parsley. Optionally, a few chives cut small, a de-salted and chopped anchovy fillet or two, a very little yellow Dijon mustard (an authentic French one, not an imitation). Should you happen to have rocket, that neglected salad and sauce herb, growing in your herb patch, use a chopped leaf or two instead of mustard. The sauce is good with cold chicken and with the breast of lamb dish called
à la sainte Ménéhould
, in other words braised and cooled breast of lamb, boned, cut into strips, breadcrumbed, and grilled on an iron grid over direct heat. An admirably economical dish.