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Salad Dressing for Ham

A creamy dressing made with eggs, cream, vinegar, mustard, butter, celery extract, and salt, cooked over boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,169 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Salad Dressing for Ham

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the butter and mustard to a smooth paste.

  2. Add the beaten eggs, then the cream, salt, and celery extract.

  3. Stir in the vinegar.

  4. Cook in a bowl over boiling water, stirring often until it thickens.

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 + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Vinegar + celerytop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,627 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  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

Eggs
Thicken the dressing as they cook, giving it a creamy body.
Butter
Adds richness and smoothness, helping the mustard form a paste with fat.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, softening the texture of the dressing.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and balances the richness.
Mustard
Adds sharp flavour and helps emulsify the fat into the dressing.

The step that matters

Cook over boiling water, stirring often. Egg proteins set gently as they heat. Too much heat or too little stirring can scramble the eggs into lumps, so gentle, constant stirring keeps the dressing smooth as it thickens.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

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