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Mayonnaise Dressing

A simple mayonnaise dressing made with egg, lemon juice, oil, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 44,316 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Mayonnaise Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Break the egg into a pint bowl.

  2. Sprinkle lemon juice over the egg.

  3. Add the oil and beat with an egg beater for 30 seconds.

  4. Continue to beat rapidly while adding oil as fast as you would stir milk into cake dough.

  5. Season with salt to taste.

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. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Egg
Its proteins and emulsifiers hold the oil and lemon juice together, giving the dressing its body.
Wesson oil
Supplies the fat that, dispersed in droplets, thickens the dressing into a creamy emulsion.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that gives the dressing a bright, sharp flavour and helps the emulsion set.

The step that matters

Adding the oil while beating. Oil must be added slowly while beating rapidly so it breaks into tiny droplets that the egg can hold. Adding it too fast can cause the emulsion to break and the dressing to separate or stay runny.

“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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