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Salad

Salad Dressing Without Oil

A creamy dressing made from sour cream, egg yolks, butter, vinegar, mustard, and salt, served cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Vinegar and mustard 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 Without Oil

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing base

  1. In a pan, combine sour cream, salt, and butter.

  2. Add the well-beaten egg yolks and stir constantly over medium heat.

  3. Bring to a boil and cook for 15 to 20 minutes.

  4. Remove from heat and pour into a china bowl to cool.

Finish and serve

  1. In a separate bowl, mix vinegar and mustard until smooth.

  2. Combine the vinegar mixture with the cooled dressing and mix well.

  3. Serve when cold.

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. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Mustard + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together849 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Walnut + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  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

Sour cream
Provides the creamy body and tangy base of the dressing.
Egg yolks
Thicken the dressing as they cook and bind it into a smooth emulsion.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the richness.
Mustard
Adds sharpness and helps stabilize the emulsion.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the dressing.

The step that matters

Stirring the egg yolks over medium heat. Egg yolks can scramble if the mixture gets too hot or is not stirred constantly. Constant stirring keeps the heat even so the yolks thicken smoothly into a custard-like base instead of curdling.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits about as well
  2. Sesamefits about as well
  3. Walnutthe original
  4. Pistachiofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, vinegar, mustard, egg, butter. 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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