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Salad

Salad Dressing for Lettuce

A vinaigrette-style dressing made with egg yolks, mustard, vinegar, oil, and seasonings for lettuce.

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

Salad Dressing for Lettuce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. In a deep dish, stir the egg yolks until light.

  2. Add salt, sugar, mustard, and cayenne pepper, mixing well.

  3. Slowly add the oil (or melted butter) and vinegar while stirring constantly until thick and light.

  4. Chill the dressing on ice until ready to use.

Serve

  1. Do not cut the lettuce; pick it into small pieces and pour the dressing over it just before serving.

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. Mustard + peppertop 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. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Emulsify the oil and vinegar and thicken the dressing into a creamy texture.
Oil
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor and giving the dressing body.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the richness of the oil.
English mustard
Helps stabilize the emulsion and adds sharp, pungent flavor.

The step that matters

Adding the oil and vinegar slowly while stirring constantly. Egg yolks can only hold oil in suspension if it is added gradually while whisking. Adding it too fast causes the emulsion to break, leaving a thin, separated dressing instead of a thick, light one.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardthe original
  3. Cucumberfits about as well
  4. Shallotfits less well

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