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Salad

Salad Dressing

A creamy lemon dressing with cayenne pepper, flour, sugar, and mustard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Salad Dressing

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 ↓

Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. In a bowl, beat the egg white until stiff.

  2. Add the egg yolk and beat again.

  3. Mix the flour, sugar, mustard, and cayenne pepper, then sift through a fine sieve.

Cook the dressing

  1. Pour hot cream over the mixture and cook in a double boiler until thick.

  2. Slowly add the lemon juice just before removing from heat.

  3. If the salad is acidic, add more sugar to the dressing.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Flour + mustardtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,066 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

Cream
Adds fat and richness, and thickens as it cooks.
Lemon juice
Adds sharp acidity that brightens the dressing.
Flour
Helps thicken the mixture so it sets as it cooks.
Sugar
Balances the sourness of the lemon juice.
Mustard
Adds sharp flavor that complements the acidity.

The step that matters

Slowly add the lemon juice just before removing from heat. Lemon juice is acidic and can curdle the egg-thickened cream if it is added quickly or while the mixture is very hot. Adding it slowly, off the heat, keeps the dressing smooth.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, lemon, pepper, flour, sugar):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, lemon, pepper, flour, sugar. 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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