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Cream Dressing

A creamy dressing made with boiling cream, flour, butter, lemon juice, mustard, and optional olives, parsley, onion.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Cream Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine boiling cream and flour in a saucepan, stirring to form a smooth paste with 2 tablespoons of butter.

  2. Cook for 2 minutes, then remove from heat and add 2 tablespoons of butter, stirring until cool and well mixed.

Season and finish

  1. Blend mustard with a little lemon juice.

  2. Season the dressing with lemon juice, coarse sea salt, black pepper, and the blended mustard.

  3. Add sliced olives or, if preferred, chopped parsley and finely chopped onion.

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.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Olive + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,649 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Lemon + olivetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the cream into a smooth, stable dressing as it cooks.
Boiling cream
Provides the liquid base and richness for the dressing.
Butter
Adds fat and smoothness, and helps the paste blend into a glossy texture.
Mustard
Adds sharp, savoury flavour that balances the richness of the cream.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour paste. Flour must be cooked briefly in the hot cream so its starch swells and thickens evenly; stirring well prevents lumps from forming.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, flour, butter, lemon, pepper, mustard, olive):

  1. Capersfits about as well
  2. Tarragonfits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Thymefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, flour, butter, lemon, pepper, mustard, olive. 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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