Skip to main content
Salad

Salad Dressing

A creamy dressing made with hard‑boiled eggs, mustard, egg yolks, sugar, oil, vinegar, and optional cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Salad Dressing

Why it works: Mustard and vinegar 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

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a bowl, combine the finely rubbed hard-boiled eggs, English mustard, salt, and beaten raw egg yolks.

  2. Add the fine sugar and mix well.

  3. Slowly pour in the fresh sweet oil while beating the mixture until it thickens.

  4. Add vinegar until the dressing reaches your desired consistency.

  5. If the dressing is not spicy enough, add a little Cayenne pepper.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Mustard + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,424 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Raw egg yolks
Emulsify the oil and thicken the dressing into a creamy body.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add body and richness, thickening the dressing as they are finely rubbed in.
Fresh sweet oil
Provides fat that, emulsified with the yolks, gives the dressing its smooth texture.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens flavour and adjusts the dressing's consistency.
Fine sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the acidity of the vinegar and mustard.

The step that matters

Slowly pour in the oil while beating. Egg yolks can only hold oil in suspension if it is added gradually while beating. Adding it too fast breaks the emulsion, so the dressing will separate and fail to thicken.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardthe original
  3. Cucumberfits less well
  4. Cabbagefits less well

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

More salad dressing recipes

Boiled 72Cream 68French 58Cooked 45Fruit 41Chicken 31 See all 528 →

You might also like

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipesFrench DressingFrench Dressing58 recipes