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Peanut Butter Salad Dressing

A creamy dressing made with peanut butter, milk, eggs, sugar, 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 ↓

Peanut Butter Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. Dissolve the peanut butter in the milk.

  2. Add the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs, rubbed smooth, along with the sugar and lemon juice.

  3. Season with salt and pepper.

  4. Beat all ingredients together until you achieve a light paste.

Serve

  1. Chill the dressing before serving.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Peanut + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,048 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  5. Peanut + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,754 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

What each ingredient does

Peanut butter
Provides the main flavor and body, thickening the dressing into a creamy paste.
Hard-boiled eggs
Their rubbed-smooth yolks emulsify with the milk and peanut butter, giving a smooth, rich texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich peanut butter and balances the sugar.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the acidity of the lemon and the saltiness of the seasoning.
Milk
Thins the peanut butter so it can be beaten into a smooth, pourable dressing.

The step that matters

Rubbing the egg yolks smooth. Lumps of yolk won't blend into the dressing, leaving a grainy texture. Pressing the yolks through a sieve or mashing them fine lets them emulsify evenly with the other ingredients.

Swap the peanut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Walnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Peanutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, milk, lemon, egg, 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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