Skip to main content
Salad

Salad Dressing Without Oil

A thick, cold dressing made from milk, egg yolks, butter, corn starch, vinegar, salt, and pepper, without oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Salad Dressing Without Oil

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Boil the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Moisten the corn-starch with a little cold milk, then add it to the boiling milk.

  3. Stir continually until it forms a smooth, thick paste.

  4. Quickly stir in the beaten egg yolks and cook for 1 minute.

Finish and cool

  1. Remove from heat and add salt, pepper, butter, and vinegar.

  2. Let it cool until icy cold 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

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

  4. Butter + corntop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Corn-starch
Thickens the milk into a smooth, thick paste as it cooks.
Egg yolks
Emulsify and thicken the dressing, giving it a creamy body without oil.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch and yolks thicken.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the dressing.

The step that matters

Stir the beaten egg yolks in quickly. Egg yolks can scramble if they meet very hot starch paste without being stirred in fast. Quick, constant stirring spreads the yolks evenly so they thicken smoothly instead of curdling into lumps.

“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.

You might also like

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipes