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Salad

Shrimp Salad Dressing

A creamy dressing for shrimp salad made with eggs, olive oil, cream, lemon, mustard, salt, and capers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 624 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Shrimp Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. In a bowl, beat the eggs.

  2. Slowly add the olive oil, drop by drop, while mixing.

  3. Add the lemon juice, cream, and salt, and mix well.

  4. Stir in the capers.

Serve

  1. Pour the dressing over the salad and garnish with lemon slices and whole shrimp.

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. Mustard + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together624 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Olive + caperstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,688 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lemon + caperstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Olive + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Olive + mustardtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Emulsify with the oil, giving the dressing a thick, creamy body.
Olive oil
Supplies fat that, dripped slowly into the eggs, forms a stable emulsion.
Cream
Adds richness and softness, rounding out the sharpness of the lemon.
Lemon
Provides acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the fat.

The step that matters

Slowly add the olive oil, drop by drop, while mixing.. Oil must be added gradually to beaten egg so tiny droplets disperse and stay suspended. Adding it too fast breaks the emulsion, leaving a greasy, separated dressing instead of a smooth, thick one.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, olive, cream, mustard, capers):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, olive, cream, mustard, capers. 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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