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Salad

Cream Salad Dressing

A creamy dressing made from hard‑boiled egg yolks, mustard, butter, cream, horseradish, salt, pepper, Worcestershire sauce, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cream Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. Rub the yolks of the hard boiled eggs very finely.

  2. Add the mixed mustard and melted butter gradually.

  3. Stir in the cream, horseradish, salt, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce.

  4. Add vinegar until the mixture reaches a creamy consistency.

Serve

  1. Pour over a bed of lettuce and serve.

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 + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  5. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Their fat and emulsifying lecithin help bind the mustard, butter and cream into a smooth dressing.
Melted butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the dressing a silky mouthfeel.
Cream
Provides fat and moisture, thinning the base into a creamy, pourable texture.
Mixed mustard
Adds sharpness and helps stabilise the emulsion so it stays smooth.
Horseradish
Contributes a sharp, pungent heat that cuts through the richness of the cream and butter.

The step that matters

Add the butter gradually. Adding melted butter slowly to the yolk and mustard lets the emulsion form. Adding it too fast can split the dressing into greasy separated layers.

“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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