Skip to main content
Drink

Corn Starch Dressing

A thick dressing made with corn starch, egg yolks, oil, lemon juice, salt, and cayenne pepper.

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

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 ↓

Corn Starch Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starch base

  1. Mix corn starch and cold water thoroughly.

  2. Add boiling water and cook over boiling water until very thick and smooth.

Finish the dressing

  1. Remove from heat and stir in egg yolks.

  2. Once cooled, add oil and lemon juice, then season with salt and 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.

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. Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

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

  3. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

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

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Egg + corntop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,484 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Corn starch
Thickens the water into a smooth, rich body as it cooks.
Egg yolks
Add richness and emulsifying power that helps bind the oil into the dressing.
Oil
Adds fat for silky texture and mouthfeel.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the richness of the oil.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolks off the heat. Egg yolks scramble if they meet very hot starch directly. Removing the pan from heat and letting the mixture cool slightly lets the yolks thicken gently and blend smoothly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Limefits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Cherryfits less well
  4. Avocadofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, corn, 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.

You might also like

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesLemon SquashLemon Squash10 recipesLemon EssenceLemon Essence8 recipes