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Salad

Salad Dressing

A creamy egg-based salad dressing with mustard, vinegar, and oil.

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

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 ↓

Salad Dressing

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the yolks

  1. Boil the eggs for 10 minutes.

  2. Cool the eggs.

  3. Rub the yolks to a powder.

  4. Season the yolks with white pepper, salt, mustard, and sugar.

  5. Mix in the beaten yolk of one egg.

Make the dressing

  1. Gradually add the salad oil while stirring continuously.

  2. Add the tarragon vinegar and regular vinegar drop by drop.

  3. Stir until the dressing resembles rich cream.

Serve

  1. Pour the dressing over the salad.

  2. Stir lightly.

  3. Serve immediately.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Flour + tarragontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together788 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Their fat and emulsifying proteins bind the oil and vinegar into a thick, creamy dressing.
Salad oil
Supplies the fat that, emulsified with the yolks, gives the dressing its rich body.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens flavour and helps balance the richness of the oil and yolks.
Flour of mustard
Mustard powder adds sharp flavour and helps stabilise the emulsion.

The step that matters

Gradually add the salad oil while stirring continuously. Oil must be added slowly while stirring so it disperses into tiny droplets held by the egg yolk's emulsifiers. Adding it too fast causes the dressing to split and separate.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, flour, mustard, sugar, tarragon, vinegar):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Dillfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, flour, mustard, sugar, tarragon, 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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