Skip to main content
Salad

Winter Salad

A salad of peas, onion, pickles, cheese, and eggs dressed with mustard, cayenne, butter, flour, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,259 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Winter Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, combine peas, onion, pickles, cheese, and chopped eggs.

  2. For the dressing, mix mustard, cayenne, salt, melted butter, flour, egg yolk, and powdered sugar in a saucepan.

Make the dressing

  1. Slowly add hot vinegar while stirring over boiling water until thickened.

  2. Cool the mixture and fold it into whipped heavy cream.

Serve

  1. Serve the salad topped with reserved egg yolks.

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. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  2. Cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  4. Cheese + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,805 recipes

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

  5. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the dressing and enrich its texture as they cook with the vinegar.
Heavy cream
Adds richness and a light, airy texture when folded into the cooled dressing.
Flour
Helps thicken the dressing so it holds together when cooked.
Hard-cooked eggs
Add body and a firm, chopped texture to the salad.
Pickles
Add acidity and a sharp contrast to the rich dressing.
Mustard
Adds sharp flavor that balances the richness of the dressing.

The step that matters

Thickening the dressing over boiling water. Hot vinegar must be added slowly while stirring, or the egg yolks can scramble and curdle. Gentle heat over boiling water lets the mixture thicken smoothly, and it should be cooled before folding into the cream so the cream does not deflate.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, cheese, egg, mustard, pepper, butter, flour):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Sesamefits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, cheese, egg, mustard, pepper, butter, flour. 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.

You might also like

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipes