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Salad

Salad Dressing

A creamy salad dressing made with butter, flour, mustard, vinegar, milk, and hard‑boiled eggs, without oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Salad Dressing

Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the white sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour.

  3. Gradually add the milk.

  4. Let the mixture boil for a few minutes.

Finish the dressing

  1. Mix the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs with the mustard.

  2. Add the vinegar to the mixture.

  3. Once the milk mixture is cool, combine it with the vinegar, mustard, and egg mixture.

  4. Chop the egg whites to decorate the salad.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + mustardtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,066 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Adds fat and richness, and carries flavour into the sauce.
Flour
Its starch thickens the milk into a smooth sauce when heated.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into the dressing.
Eggs
The yolks add richness and body, and the whites are used for decoration.
Prepared mustard
Adds sharp flavour that balances the richness of the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the dressing.

The step that matters

Boil the flour and milk mixture fully, then let it cool before combining. Boiling gelatinises the flour starch, so the sauce thickens and loses its raw flour taste. Cooling it before adding the egg and vinegar helps keep the eggs from scrambling and the dressing smooth.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, vinegar, milk, egg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, vinegar, milk, egg. 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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