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Salad

Boiled Dressing

A boiled dressing made from eggs, sugar, mustard, salt, white pepper, and vinegar, thickened and optionally thinned with sour cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,067 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. Mix the eggs (or yolks), sugar, mustard, salt, and white pepper in the top of a double boiler.

  2. Set the double boiler over hot water and add the vinegar, stirring constantly.

  3. Cook until the mixture thickens.

Finish and serve

  1. Cool the dressing.

  2. Strain it.

  3. If necessary, thin it with sour cream before using.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Sugar + mustardtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,424 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. White pepper + vinegartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Egg proteins coagulate when heated, thickening the dressing into a smooth, creamy emulsion.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the sharpness of the vinegar.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the dressing its tangy flavour.
Mustard
Adds sharp flavour and helps stabilise the emulsion.

The step that matters

Cooking the egg mixture until it thickens. Heat must be gentle and constant, with the mixture stirred over hot water. Egg proteins set at higher temperatures, so overheating can curdle the eggs and leave lumps, while undercooking leaves the dressing thin.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, mustard, vinegar):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Dillfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, mustard, 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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