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Salad

Salad Dressing

A custard-style dressing made with vinegar, butter, egg yolks, cream, salt, mustard, sugar, and celery seed.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Salad Dressing

Why it works: Mustard and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,169 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Boil the vinegar and butter together.

  2. Beat the egg yolks in a bowl.

  3. Pour the boiling vinegar over the egg yolks while stirring continuously.

  4. Return the mixture to the heat and stir until it thickens like custard.

  5. Let it cool completely.

Finish and bottle

  1. Mix the cream with the salt, mustard, sugar, and bruised celery seed.

  2. Combine the cooled custard with the cream mixture.

  3. Bottle the dressing; it will keep for a month.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the vinegar mixture into a custard and emulsify the dressing.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps set the custard.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy body to the dressing.
Mustard
Adds sharp flavour and helps stabilise the emulsion.
Butter
Adds fat and a rounded richness to the cooked vinegar base.

The step that matters

Return the mixture to the heat and stir until it thickens like custard.. Egg yolks thicken when gently heated, but if they get too hot they scramble into lumps. Keep the heat low and stir constantly, removing the pan once it coats a spoon.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, egg, butter, cream, mustard, sugar):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, egg, butter, cream, mustard, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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