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Salad

Salad Dressing

A creamy dressing made from boiled eggs, mustard, oil, and vinegar.

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 tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 901 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. Boil the eggs for 10 minutes, then cool them.

  2. Rub the yolks into a powder in a bowl.

  3. Add white pepper, salt, mustard powder, and sifted sugar to the yolks.

  4. Gradually mix in the salad oil while stirring continuously.

  5. Add tarragon vinegar and regular vinegar drop by drop, stirring the same way.

  6. The dressing should resemble rich cream.

Serve

  1. Pour it over the salad and stir lightly.

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 + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together901 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  2. Tarragon + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. White pepper + tarragontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together139 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Sugar + vinegartop 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

Eggs
Egg yolks emulsify with the oil, giving the dressing its thick, creamy body.
Salad oil
Forms the bulk of the emulsion, giving richness and a smooth, creamy texture.
Mustard powder
Helps stabilise the emulsion and adds a sharp, savoury bite.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that balances the richness of the oil and yolks.

The step that matters

Adding the oil and vinegar gradually. Oil must be added slowly while stirring continuously so the yolk can break it into tiny droplets. Adding it too fast or all at once causes the emulsion to split and the dressing to separate.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Dillfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, mustard, sugar, tarragon, vinegar. 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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