Mayonnaise is not as good as hollandaise

Growing up, my sister and I had this book called From Bach to Verse. It took the famous hooks from classical pieces and added words to them. (This is a unsolicited plug for the book. I don't know if it's even in print any more, but it's brilliant.) For instance the chorus of Beethoven's 9th had the following words: "Sigmund Freud never hoid a concert due to chronic slouch. All his ritzy, somewhat schitzy patients tied him to his couch."

I don't know exactly what year it was (the book came out when I was 7, so I don't think it was too far after that), but my mother, sister and I were sitting at the piano in the living room plinking out the songs on the piano while singing the words. My father, who was sitting in the kitchen (probably eating a clandestine bowl of ice cream), would then yell out the name of the piece and the composer. As an avid classical music fan, my father found this exercise exceedingly simple, but he outdid himself with one piece. My sister, who would have been 4-5 years old at the time asked my mother spelling out the word, "what is M-A-Y-O-N-N-A-I-S-E?" Without hearing any other words in the phrase or even the tune, my father yelled out, "Chopin!" Unbelievable. He was, in fact, correct - the piece was Chopin's Polonaises. The "lyrics" are, "Mayonnaise is not as good as hollandaise. Hollandaise is inferior to sauce bernaise." Genius.

Today I made my own mayonnaise. I've been a sous-chef on this endeavor before when my ex periodically made his own, but this was the first time I've tried it on my own. I originally intended to use my blender or Cuisinart (as those are the ways he did it), but when I went digging into my cabinet to see which one I could grab first, I remembered my immersion blender. I decided that would be my implement of choice. I feel fairly certain that pretty much every single cookbook I have has a mayonnaise recipe, but I chose to go with my cooking class cookbook - it's a great reference for everything from basics like mayonnaise to ridiculous recipes (involving ingredients I've never seen in person) I will never attempt. The book is On Cooking: A Textbook of Culinary Fundamentals by Labensky and Hause. It's super thorough and is usually my first stop. (I think in a future post I'll list the cookbooks I have. It's a motley crew.)

Anyway, I only had two eggs in my fridge (alas, the last of my farm fresh eggs), so I needed to halve the recipe. I had to decide between regular ground mustard and Coleman's mustard and ended up going with the former. I think next time I'll put some Coleman's in there - maybe it will give it a bit more personality. And that's what the finished product really missed overall...personality. I suppose I could have done the math wrong (which, as a former math teacher would be just shy of tragic), but it sure seemed like there wasn't enough vinegar in the recipe. It said to add lemon juice to taste, which I did. But at a certain point (always taste throughout the process!) it got too lemony, so I ended up also adding more vinegar instead of more lemon juice to it to balance out the immense amount of oil and to loosen it up a bit. I think in retrospect I'll also add a bit more salt the next time around.

What are my plans for the mayo you might ask? Well, I bought some grapes, some apples, and some canned turkey (yes, canned turkey) at Costco a week ago. I think I might see if I have walnuts and make some sort of Waldorf salad. I'll definitely have to thin the may with something, so I'll need to do some experimentation. I either need to get some big crispy lettuce leaves (Bibb or Butter, perhaps) or a tasty little roll on which to serve the outcome. I might also need to replace the walnuts with pecans, but I'll need to taste that and see if it works. I love pecans, but they're definitely different from walnuts.