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Salad

Salad Dressing

A vinaigrette made with mustard, sugar, salt, red pepper, egg yolks, lemon juice, vinegar, salad oil, and optional whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Salad Dressing

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks, mustard, sugar, salt, and red pepper until very light.

  2. Gradually add the salad oil, mixing until the dressing thickens.

  3. Thin the mixture with vinegar, then continue adding oil more rapidly.

  4. To prevent curdling, add salt only after the dressing is made.

Finish and serve

  1. For an improvement, fold in whipped cream just before serving.

  2. You can substitute lemon juice for vinegar if desired.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  5. Mustard + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Raw egg yolks
Act as an emulsifier, holding the oil and vinegar together in a smooth, thick dressing.
Salad oil
Supplies the fat that gives the dressing its body and richness.
Mustard
Helps stabilise the emulsion so the oil stays dispersed in the dressing.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and thins the mixture.

The step that matters

Add the oil gradually while mixing. Oil must be dispersed into tiny droplets held by the egg yolk emulsifier. Adding oil too quickly overwhelms the yolks, so the dressing fails to thicken and may separate or curdle.

“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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