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Salad

Salad Dressing That Will Keep

A salad dressing made with mustard, sugar, egg yolks, oil, butter, vinegar, lemon juice, and whipped cream that keeps.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Salad Dressing That Will Keep

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. Mix mustard and sugar with a little hot water.

  2. Beat the egg yolks with red pepper and coarse sea salt.

  3. Add the mustard mixture, olive oil, melted butter, vinegar, and lemon juice.

  4. Stir constantly in an earthen dish to prevent separation.

Store and serve

  1. Store in a glass jar with a screw top.

  2. When ready to use, add 1 quart of whipped cream.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Mustard + olivetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 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
Emulsify the oil and butter, giving the dressing its thick, creamy body.
Melted butter
Adds richness and fat, making the dressing smooth and mellow.
Olive oil
Adds fat that forms the emulsion and carries flavor.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavor and balances the richness.
Mustard
Helps stabilize the emulsion and adds sharp flavor.
Whipped cream
Lightens the dressing and adds moisture and softness when added at serving.

The step that matters

Stir constantly in an earthen dish to prevent separation.. The dressing is an emulsion of fat and water-based liquids held together by egg yolk. Without constant stirring while the fats are added, the mixture can break and separate into oily and watery layers.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardthe original
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Shallotfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, pepper, olive, butter, vinegar, 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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