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Salad

Salad Dressing

A creamy dressing made from hard‑boiled egg yolks, mustard, sugar, salt, oil or cream, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Salad Dressing

Why it works: Mustard and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,053 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. Pound the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs very smoothly.

  2. Mix in the mustard, sugar, and salt.

  3. Gradually add the cream or oil and vinegar, mixing well.

  4. Adjust salt and acidity to taste.

Add flavorings

  1. For added flavor, incorporate drops of Chui or cayenne vinegar.

  2. Optionally, add eschalot vinegar or other flavorings.

  3. Rub the salad bowl with a cut clove of garlic for a subtle flavor.

Before you start

  1. Ensure the eggs are boiled for 15 minutes and cooled before pounding for a smooth mixture.

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 + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Mustard + clovetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,829 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

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

  5. Garlic + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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 cream or oil and give the dressing its thick, smooth body.
Mustard
Helps stabilize the emulsion and adds sharp flavor that balances the richness.
Cream or oil
Provides fat that gives the dressing its richness and silky texture.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and cuts through the fat.

The step that matters

Adding the cream or oil gradually. Fat added too quickly to the yolks can fail to emulsify and split, so it must be added slowly while mixing to form a stable, smooth dressing.

Swap the garlic

The recipe marks garlic as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, mustard, sugar, cream, vinegar, caviar, clove):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Garlicthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, mustard, sugar, cream, vinegar, caviar, clove. 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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