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Salad

Bacon Dressing

A salad dressing made from bacon fat, lemon juice, vinegar, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Bacon Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bacon fat

  1. Cut the bacon fat into slices, then into very small pieces.

  2. Fry the pieces until the oil extracted is light brown.

Make and serve the dressing

  1. Remove the pan from the heat.

  2. Add the lemon juice, vinegar, and pepper.

  3. Pour the dressing over the salad with the bacon pieces.

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. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Lemon + vinegartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,334 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Bacon fat
Provides fat and savory flavor, and the rendered oil carries the dressing's richness.
Lemon juice
Adds bright acidity that balances the rich, fatty bacon oil.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that cuts through the fat and brightens the dressing.

The step that matters

Frying the bacon fat to light brown. Heat browns the fat and gives it flavor, but taking it too dark makes the oil bitter and burnt-tasting. Stop once it is light brown, and remove the pan from the heat before adding the acids.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Cherryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, 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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