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Salad

Salad Dressing for Lettuce

A simple dressing made from hard‑boiled egg yolks, mustard, vinegar, sugar, and salt, served over lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 for Lettuce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. In a bowl, mash the yolks of the hard boiled eggs with a fork.

  2. Add the mixed mustard and mix to a paste.

  3. Slowly add the vinegar while mixing carefully.

  4. Stir in the sugar and salt to taste.

Serve

  1. Cut the lettuce with a sharp knife and pour the dressing over it.

  2. Garnish with additional hard boiled eggs.

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. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Vinegar + lettucetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,370 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Mustard + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,424 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 vinegar and mustard to give the dressing a thick, creamy body.
Mixed mustard
Helps bind the yolks and vinegar into a stable, smooth paste.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that balances the richness of the yolks.
Sugar
Softens the sharpness of the vinegar for a rounder flavour.

The step that matters

Slowly add the vinegar while mixing carefully. Adding acid too fast to egg yolks can break the emulsion, so the dressing turns thin and watery instead of thick and creamy. Adding it gradually while stirring lets the yolk fats hold the liquid evenly.

Swap the lettuce

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, mustard, vinegar, 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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