Skip to main content
Salad

Salad Cream

A creamy dressing made with mustard, cream, vinegar, sugar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Vinegar and mustard 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 Cream

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the mustard and salt together.

  2. Stir in the cream.

  3. Add the vinegar drop by drop and use as required.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Cream + vinegartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,064 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Cream
Provides fat and body, giving the dressing a smooth, rich texture.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that gives the dressing its tang.
Made mustard
Adds sharpness and helps hold the cream and vinegar together as a smooth dressing.
Castor sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar and mustard.

The step that matters

Adding the vinegar drop by drop. Acid can cause dairy proteins in cream to thicken unevenly or curdle. Adding the vinegar slowly while stirring lets it disperse gradually, keeping the dressing smooth.

“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.

You might also like