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Mayonnaise Dressing

A creamy dressing made from egg, mustard, oil, lemon juice, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

Mayonnaise Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chill all ingredients.

  2. Put the whole egg in a bowl and beat thoroughly.

  3. Mix mustard, pepper, salt, and sugar into the eggs.

Make the dressing

  1. Add oil and lemon juice alternately until the desired thickness is reached.

  2. Use about 1 cup of oil and the juice of ½ lemon for one egg.

Rest

  1. For best flavor, make the dressing a day in advance and refrigerate.

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Whole egg
Emulsifies the oil and lemon juice, giving the dressing its body and thickness.
Oil
Provides the fat that, dispersed through the egg, makes the dressing rich and thick.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens flavor and helps keep the emulsion stable.
Mustard
Its natural emulsifiers help hold the oil and egg together in a stable emulsion.

The step that matters

Add oil and lemon juice alternately. Adding oil slowly while beating lets tiny droplets disperse into the egg, forming a stable emulsion. Adding it too fast can break the mixture so it separates and fails to thicken.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, pepper, sugar, lemon):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, pepper, sugar, lemon. 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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