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Salad

Salad Dressing Without Oil

A creamy, oil-free dressing made with egg yolks, mustard, cream, vinegar, and bacon, served over lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,356 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Salad Dressing Without Oil

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. Make a smooth paste with the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs in a bowl rubbed with shallot.

  2. Add mustard, cayenne, black pepper, and salt to taste.

  3. Gradually stir in the cream until well combined.

  4. Mix in tarragon vinegar to taste.

Prepare the bacon and serve

  1. Pour over washed and dried lettuce leaves.

  2. Cut bacon into small dice and fry until crispy.

  3. Add vinegar to the bacon and let cool for a few minutes.

  4. Pour the bacon mixture over the seasoned lettuce.

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 + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,356 recipes

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

  2. Tarragon + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Pepper + tarragontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Emulsify with the cream to give the dressing a smooth, thick body without oil.
Cream
Adds richness and moisture, loosening the yolk paste into a pourable dressing.
Mustard
Adds sharpness and helps bind the emulsion together.
Bacon
Adds savory fat and salt, with crisp texture from frying.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and cuts the richness of the cream and bacon fat.

The step that matters

Gradually stir in the cream. Adding cream slowly to the yolk paste lets the mixture combine smoothly. Adding it all at once can leave lumps or a thin, separated dressing.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Horseradishfits about as well
  2. Shallotfits about as well
  3. Lettucethe original
  4. Chivefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, mustard, pepper, cream, tarragon, 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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