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Dessert

Fruit Salad Dressing

A sweet and tangy dressing made with sugar, butter, lemon juice, egg yolks, salt, and whipped cream, served over fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Fruit Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. In a bowl, cream together the sugar and butter.

  2. Add the lemon juice, egg yolks, and salt, then cook over low heat until thickened.

Serve

  1. When ready to serve, thin the dressing with whipped cream.

  2. Serve with a combination of fruits like orange, pineapple, raisins, and nuts.

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

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

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the butter cream into a smooth base.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy body to the dressing.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the sweetness.
Egg yolks
Proteins set when heated, thickening the dressing as it cooks.
Whipped cream
Lightens the texture and thins the thickened dressing for serving.

The step that matters

Cooking the egg yolk mixture over low heat. Egg yolk proteins thicken as they gently set. Too much heat makes them curdle into lumps, so keep the heat low and stir constantly until the dressing coats a spoon.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, egg, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits about as well
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, egg, cream. 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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