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Salad

Scotch Sauce for Raw Salads

A vinaigrette-like sauce made with egg yolks, mustard, ketchup, tarragon, vinegar, and thick cream for raw salads.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 901 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

Scotch Sauce for Raw Salads

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, mash the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs.

  2. Add the mustard, ketchup, tarragon, and white wine vinegar; mix well.

  3. Stir in the thick cream until fully incorporated.

Serve

  1. Once the salad is prepared and arranged on a dish, pour the sauce evenly over it.

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 + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together901 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  2. Tarragon + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Tarragon + white winetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together409 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. White wine + vinegartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,776 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Emulsify with the cream and mustard to give the sauce a smooth, thick body.
Mustard
Adds sharp flavour and helps stabilise the emulsion of yolk and fat.
White wine vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich yolk and cream.
Thick cream
Provides fat and richness, giving the sauce a smooth, creamy texture.

The step that matters

Stir in the thick cream until fully incorporated. Cream must be fully blended into the yolk mixture so it forms a smooth, stable emulsion. Unblended pockets of fat or a split, grainy texture can result if it is added too quickly or not mixed thoroughly.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, ketchup, tarragon, white wine, vinegar, cream):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Horseradishfits about as well
  3. Mustardthe original
  4. Chivefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, ketchup, tarragon, white wine, 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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