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Cooked Dressing

A white sauce dressing made with butter, flour, milk, mustard, pepper, salt, egg yolks, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Cooked Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter.

  2. Whisk in the flour, salt, mustard, pepper, and milk.

  3. Beat the egg yolks and mix them with the vinegar.

  4. Place the sauce over boiling water and stir in the egg and vinegar mixture until it thickens.

Cool and store

  1. Cool quickly.

  2. Store the dressing in a scalded glass jar and pour a few drops of vinegar on top.

  3. Cover tightly and keep in a cool place.

  4. If the dressing is too thick, thin it with cream or milk.

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. 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. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Flour
Thickens the milk mixture so the dressing has body.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as they cook and add richness.
Butter
Adds fat and smooth flavour to the base sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the dressing its sharp tang.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour and yolks thicken.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg and vinegar mixture until it thickens. Egg yolks set when heated, but if they get too hot they can curdle or scramble. Heating gently over boiling water, with constant stirring, lets the sauce thicken smoothly.

Swap the mustard

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

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

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