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Mayonnaise Dressing

A creamy dressing made from mustard, salt, cayenne pepper, oil, lemon juice or vinegar, and egg yolk or whole egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Mayonnaise Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the dry ingredients: mustard, salt, cayenne, and fruit sugar.

  2. Add the egg yolk and beat thoroughly with a wooden spoon or Dover beater.

  3. Add a few drops of oil and beat thoroughly.

  4. Add a few drops of lemon juice or vinegar.

  5. Continue adding lemon juice and about half of the oil.

  6. Add the remaining oil in larger quantities.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  3. Mustard + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Egg yolk
Emulsifies the oil and lemon juice, holding the mixture together as a thick dressing.
Salad oil
Supplies the fat that, dispersed into droplets, gives the dressing its rich body.
Lemon juice or vinegar
Adds acidity that balances the richness and helps stabilise the emulsion.
Mustard
Contains natural emulsifiers that help keep the oil and liquid from separating.

The step that matters

Adding the oil slowly at the start. Oil must be added a few drops at a time while beating so it disperses into tiny droplets surrounded by egg yolk. Adding it too fast before the emulsion forms can make the mixture break and separate.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Mustardthe original

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