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Cream Salad Dressing

A creamy dressing made with milk, egg yolks, flour, sugar, mustard, vinegar, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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 ↓

Cream Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Heat the milk in a saucepan until just boiling.

  2. Beat the egg yolks in a bowl and stir them into the hot milk.

  3. Mix the flour with a little cold milk to form a paste, then add it to the saucepan.

Finish the dressing

  1. Stir in the sugar, salt, mustard, red pepper, and butter.

  2. Finally, add the vinegar and mix well.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + mustardtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,066 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the other ingredients thicken and enrich.
Egg yolks
Thicken the dressing and add richness as the heat sets their proteins.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, stable body as its starch swells with heat.
Butter
Adds fat for a smoother mouthfeel and a rounder, richer flavour.
Vinegar
Adds the sharp acidity that defines the dressing's tang.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the sharpness of the vinegar.

The step that matters

Stirring the beaten egg yolks into the hot milk. Egg proteins set at high heat and can curdle or turn grainy if they meet hot liquid too abruptly. Stirring constantly while combining them helps the yolks disperse evenly and keeps the dressing smooth.

Swap the mustard

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, flour, 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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