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Mayonnaise Dressing

A homemade mayonnaise dressing made from egg yolks, mustard, vinegar, melted butter, lemon juice, salt, and pepper.

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

Mayonnaise Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Beat the egg yolks and mustard together for one minute.

  2. Gradually add the melted butter, one drop at a time, while continuously beating.

  3. Once the mixture is jelly-like, add a little lemon juice.

  4. Add a few drops of vinegar, beating well.

  5. If the mixture starts to curdle, place it on ice.

  6. After adding vinegar, mix in salt and pepper.

  7. Whip for five minutes.

  8. Pour into a glass dish.

  9. Keep the mayonnaise cool.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Mustard + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  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

Egg yolks
Emulsify the oil and butter into a thick, stable sauce.
Melted butter
Supplies the fat that, dispersed in droplets, thickens the sauce and gives it richness.
Mustard
Helps hold the emulsion together and stabilizes the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and helps keep the emulsion stable.

The step that matters

Adding the butter one drop at a time. Fat must be dispersed into tiny droplets surrounded by egg yolk before more is added. Adding it too fast overwhelms the yolk, so the emulsion breaks and the sauce curdles or stays runny.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, vinegar, butter, lemon, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits about as well
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, vinegar, butter, lemon, pepper. 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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