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Salad

Cream Salad Dressing

A creamy dressing made from hard-boiled eggs, butter, mustard, vinegar, sugar, sweet cream, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

Cream Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the eggs hard.

  2. Remove the yolks and cream them with the mustard, salt, sugar, and melted butter.

  3. Add vinegar, then very carefully add the cream.

  4. Beat well with an egg beater until thick.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

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

  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

Egg yolks
Emulsify with the butter and cream, giving the dressing body and a smooth, rich texture.
Sweet cream
Adds moisture and richness, thinning the yolk base into a pourable dressing that thickens when beaten.
Melted butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the yolks blend smoothly into a creamy base.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the richness of the cream and yolks.
Mustard
Adds sharp flavour and helps stabilise the emulsion of yolks and fat.

The step that matters

Adding the cream. Cream added too quickly to the yolk and butter base can break the emulsion, leaving it thin and greasy instead of thick. Adding it slowly, while beating, lets the fat disperse evenly so the dressing stays smooth.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Mustardthe original
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Cucumberfits about as well

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