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Mayonnaise Dressing

A cold dressing made from egg yolks, oil, lemon juice or vinegar, salt, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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

Prepare

  1. Chill the oil, vinegar, and egg yolks until needed.

  2. Set a bowl on cracked ice.

  3. Carefully break the yolks into the bowl and beat them slowly.

Make the dressing

  1. Gradually mix in the lemon juice or vinegar until the mixture is a thick yellow batter.

  2. Add the salt and cayenne pepper last.

  3. Pour into a small pitcher and keep on ice.

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. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

  3. Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

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

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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 into the acid, giving the dressing its thick, creamy body.
Salad oil
Provides the fat that forms the body of the dressing once emulsified with the yolks.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity for bright flavor and helps stabilize the emulsion.

The step that matters

Gradually mix in the lemon juice or vinegar until the mixture is a thick yellow batter.. Adding acid too quickly or before the yolks have thickened can prevent the emulsion from forming, so the dressing stays thin or separates. Keeping everything cold and adding liquids slowly helps the yolk proteins hold the oil droplets in suspension.

“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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