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Ham Salad

A salad of boiled ham and lettuce dressed with a sour cream, vinegar, mustard, and egg yolk mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Ham Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the salad

  1. Combine the small bits of boiled ham and the hearts and inside leaves of the lettuce in a salad bowl.

Make the dressing

  1. Mix the sour cream, vinegar, pepper, salt, butter, sugar, and mustard in a saucepan until smooth.

  2. Boil the mixture, then add the beaten egg yolks, stirring carefully until it thickens to the consistency of starch.

Combine and chill

  1. Pour the dressing over the salad and mix carefully.

  2. Chill in a cool place or on ice before serving.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Lettuce + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,037 recipes

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

  4. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  5. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Sour cream
Forms the creamy base of the dressing and gives it body and a mild tang.
Egg yolks
Thicken the dressing as they heat and add richness and smoothness.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the dressing and balances the cream.
Mustard
Adds sharp flavour and helps emulsify the dressing.
Boiled ham
Provides the savoury, meaty main body of the salad.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks to the boiling mixture. If the hot mixture is boiled too hard or the yolks are added too quickly without stirring, the egg proteins can scramble and curdle instead of thickening smoothly. Stirring carefully and keeping the heat controlled lets the yolks thicken the dressing evenly.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, cream, milk, vinegar, pepper, butter, sugar):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, cream, milk, vinegar, pepper, butter, sugar. 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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