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Salad

A Salad Sauce

A light salad sauce made with egg yolks, Parmesan, mustard, ketchup, oil, tarragon vinegar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 901 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

A Salad Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, combine the egg yolks, Parmesan cheese, mustard, ketchup, and salad oil.

  2. Beat the mixture until well combined.

  3. Add the tarragon vinegar and mix thoroughly.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the lettuce or vegetables, ensuring it does not sit at the bottom.

  2. Serve with chopped endive and celery, garnished with pickled beetroot and red cabbage.

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 + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together901 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  2. Tarragon + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Parmesan cheese + mustardtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together545 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Mustard + ketchuptop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together331 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard boiled egg yolks
Emulsify with the oil to give the sauce a thick, creamy body.
Salad oil
Adds fat that carries flavor and gives the sauce a smooth texture.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness of the yolks and oil.
Prepared mustard
Contains emulsifiers that help hold the oil and vinegar together in the sauce.
Parmesan cheese
Adds savory, salty depth and umami to the sauce.

The step that matters

Add the tarragon vinegar and mix thoroughly. Vinegar added too quickly or without thorough mixing can break the emulsion, leaving the oil separated instead of a smooth, cohesive sauce. Mixing well keeps the yolks, mustard and oil bound together.

Swap the tarragon

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonthe original
  3. Celeryfits less well
  4. Allspicefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, parmesan cheese, mustard, ketchup, 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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