Skip to main content
Drink

Fruit Salad Dressing

A creamy dressing made with milk, corn starch, egg, butter, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, salt, sugar, and mustard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Fruit Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Bring the milk to a boil.

  2. Dissolve the corn starch in a little milk and stir it into the hot milk.

  3. Boil until it begins to thicken.

  4. Stir in the beaten egg while the mixture is boiling hot.

Finish the dressing

  1. Add the butter, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, salt, sugar, and mustard.

  2. Beat all ingredients together until well combined.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the liquid base that thickens into a creamy dressing.
Corn starch
Thickens the milk as it heats, giving the dressing body.
Egg
Adds richness and helps set the custard as it heats.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the dressing.
Sugar
Sweetens the dressing and balances the lemon's acidity.
Butter
Adds fat for a smoother, richer mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Stir in the beaten egg while the mixture is boiling hot. Adding egg to very hot liquid can scramble it. Stirring constantly as the egg goes in lets it blend smoothly and cook into the thickened custard instead of forming lumps.

Swap the mustard

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, corn, egg, butter, lemon, pepper, sugar. 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

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipesLemon EssenceLemon Essence8 recipes