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Salad

Salad Dressing

A creamy dressing made with milk, butter, mustard, egg yolks, cream, lemon juice, and served over boiled salted potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Salad Dressing

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. Boil the milk, butter, and mustard together.

  2. Pour the mixture over the well-beaten egg yolks and mix thoroughly.

  3. When cold, add the cream and lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Pour the dressing over the boiled, sliced, salted potatoes.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

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

  2. Mustard + potatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,340 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Milk + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  5. Lemon + mustardtop 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the dressing as they set with heat, giving it a smooth, creamy body.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the dressing.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the egg yolks thicken into a custard-like dressing.
Cream
Adds richness and body, softening the sharpness of the acid.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances its richness.
Potatoes
Serve as the base that the dressing coats.

The step that matters

Pour the mixture over the egg yolks gradually while mixing. Adding hot liquid to raw egg yolks too quickly can scramble them. Pouring slowly while whisking mixes the yolks with the hot liquid gently, so the dressing thickens smoothly.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, butter, cream, lemon, potato. 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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