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Mayonnaise Dressing

A creamy dressing made with egg yolks, oil, vinegar, lemon juice, salt, sugar, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Mayonnaise Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix salt, sugar, and cayenne pepper thoroughly.

  2. Add egg yolks and beat with an egg beater.

  3. Gradually add vinegar, then oil drop by drop, beating until very thick.

  4. Add lemon juice to thin the mixture, alternating until all is used.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  3. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Egg yolks
Emulsify the oil and water, giving the dressing its thick, creamy structure.
Oil
Provides fat and richness, forming the body of the dressing as it is beaten in.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and thins the mixture to a pourable consistency.
Vinegar
Adds acidity and helps the egg yolks emulsify with the oil.

The step that matters

Adding the oil drop by drop. Oil added too quickly can overwhelm the egg yolks, so the emulsion breaks and the dressing separates instead of thickening. Beating steadily while adding the oil slowly lets the droplets disperse and stay suspended.

“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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