Skip to main content
Salad

Mayonaise Salad Dressing

A creamy dressing made with egg yolk, mustard, lemon juice, oil, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Mayonaise Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mayonnaise

  1. In a bowl, mix the egg yolk, salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper, dry mustard, and lemon juice or vinegar until smooth.

  2. Gradually add the salad oil and vinegar (or lemon juice), a few drops at a time, stirring constantly until fully combined.

Fix curdling

  1. If the mixture curdles, stir in ½ teaspoon of vinegar or lemon juice alone.

  2. If it still curdles, refrigerate for a while, then try mixing in another yolk and gradually incorporate the curdled sauce.

Variation

  1. For a white mayonnaise, use the egg white instead.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Egg + mustardtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,210 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 lemon juice or vinegar, holding the sauce together as a thick dressing.
Salad oil
Forms the bulk of the dressing, providing richness and body as it is dispersed into droplets.
Lemon juice or vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps stabilise the emulsion.
Dry mustard
Contains natural emulsifiers that help bind the oil and yolk together.

The step that matters

Adding the oil gradually. Oil must be dispersed into tiny droplets around the yolk's lecithin. Adding it too quickly overwhelms the yolk, so the emulsion breaks and the sauce curdles.

Swap the mustard

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, pepper, 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.

You might also like

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipes