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Salad

Oyster Salad Dressing

A creamy dressing for oyster salad made with sour whipped cream, egg yolk, mustard, salt, cayenne pepper, sugar, olive oil, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Oyster Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. Beat the egg yolk with mustard, salt, cayenne pepper, and sugar.

  2. Add olive oil, then mix in the sour whipped cream and lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Pour the dressing over the salad and serve.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Olive + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Mustard + olivetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolk
Emulsifies the oil and liquids, giving the dressing a thick, smooth body.
Olive oil
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and giving a silky mouthfeel.
Sour whipped cream
Adds tangy richness and moisture, thickening the dressing slightly.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the fat.
Sugar
Adds a little sweetness to balance the acidity and heat.

The step that matters

Adding the olive oil. Oil must be added slowly while the egg yolk is being beaten. The yolk's lecithin then holds the oil in tiny droplets, forming a stable emulsion. Adding it too fast can cause the dressing to split and look oily.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Mustardthe original

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