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Salad

Another Salad Sauce

A creamy salad sauce made with eggs, anchovy essence, mustard, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Mustard and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,067 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Another Salad Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Smooth the hard-boiled egg in a bowl.

  2. Beat the raw egg well and mix it with the smoothed hard-boiled egg.

  3. Add water, salt, cayenne pepper, black pepper, mustard, vinegar, essence of anchovies, and rich cream.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + creamtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together21,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Pepper and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 21,449 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Hard-boiled egg
Smooth, thickens the sauce body and gives it a rich, creamy base.
Raw egg
Beaten and blended in to add emulsifying richness and body to the sauce.
Rich cream
Adds fat and a smooth, mellow texture that softens the sharper flavors.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the richness of the egg and cream.
Mustard
Contributes sharpness and helps stabilize the emulsion.

Swap the mustard

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, pepper, vinegar, 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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