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Mayonnaise Dressing

A simple mayonnaise dressing made with mustard, sugar, cayenne pepper, olive oil, lemon juice, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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 ↓

Mayonnaise Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the emulsion

  1. In a bowl, mix mustard, sugar, and cayenne pepper.

  2. Slowly add olive oil drop by drop while stirring.

  3. Continue stirring until the mixture thickens.

Finish

  1. Add the juice of half a lemon and salt, mixing well.

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. Olive + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Mustard + olivetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Olive oil
Forms the body of the dressing as tiny droplets suspended in the mixture.
Mustard
Acts as an emulsifier, helping the oil and watery ingredients stay combined and thick.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the rich oil.
Sugar
Adds mild sweetness that rounds out the sharpness of the lemon and mustard.

The step that matters

Adding the olive oil slowly. Oil must be added drop by drop while stirring so each droplet is coated and dispersed. Adding it too quickly overwhelms the mustard's emulsifying action, so the oil separates and the dressing fails to thicken.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Tomatofits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, pepper, olive, 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.

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