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Salad

Salad Dressing Made with Butter

A creamy salad dressing made by combining butter, flour, milk, vinegar, eggs, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Salad Dressing Made with Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cream

  1. Heat the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and stir until smooth, but do not let it brown.

  3. Add the milk and bring to a boil until it thickens to a cream.

  4. Place the saucepan in a larger vessel of hot water.

Make the dressing

  1. Beat the eggs and mix in the salt, cayenne pepper, sugar, mustard, and vinegar.

  2. Stir this mixture into the boiling cream until it thickens like a soft custard, about five minutes.

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

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

  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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + mustardtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,066 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, fatty mouthfeel to the dressing.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a cream by swelling with heat and binding liquid.
Eggs
Thicken the mixture into a soft custard as they set with gentle heat.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the dressing its tangy flavour and balances the richness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar and mustard.

The step that matters

Stir the egg mixture into the boiling cream. Egg proteins set at gentle heat and can scramble if they meet too much heat too fast. Tempering the eggs into the hot cream and keeping the saucepan in hot water helps them thicken smoothly into a custard.

Swap the mustard

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, sugar, pepper, milk, vinegar, egg. 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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