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Salad

A Salad Sauce

A sauce made from hard‑boiled egg yolks, Parmesan, mustard, oil, vinegar, anchovy liquor, Cayenne pepper, sea salt, parsley, and shallot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 859 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

A Salad Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Beat the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs with oil and vinegar.

  2. Add anchovy liquor, Cayenne pepper, coarse sea salt, parsley, and shallot, then mix well to combine.

Serve

  1. Serve as a sauce for cold lobster.

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. Mustard + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together859 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  4. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mustard + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,588 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard-boiled egg yolks
Emulsify with the oil to give the sauce a thick, creamy body.
Oil
Provides fat that makes the sauce rich and smooth.
Vinegar
Adds sharpness that balances the richness of the yolks and oil.
Anchovy liquor
Adds savory depth and a salty, umami note.
Parmesan cheese
Contributes savory, salty flavor to the sauce.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, parmesan cheese, vinegar, anchovy, pepper, parsley, shallot):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, parmesan cheese, vinegar, anchovy, pepper, parsley, shallot. 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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