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Boiled Oil Salad Dressing

A salad dressing made by boiling oil with eggs, mustard, sugar, salt, lemon juice, and paprika or cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Boiled Oil Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing base

  1. In a double boiler, break the eggs and beat them.

  2. Mix the mustard, sugar, salt, oil, and lemon juice in a bowl.

  3. Add the mixture to the beaten eggs in the double boiler.

Cook

  1. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until thickened.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

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

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

  4. Mustard + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Thicken and set as they cook gently, giving the dressing body.
Oil
Adds richness and a smooth, emulsified texture to the dressing.
Mustard
Helps stabilise the emulsion and adds a sharp, tangy flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the richness.
Cream
Adds richness and a softer, smoother mouthfeel to the finished dressing.

The step that matters

Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until thickened. Egg proteins set at moderate temperatures. Too much heat or too little stirring can scramble the eggs, leaving lumps instead of a smooth, thickened dressing.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Mustardthe original

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

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