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Mayonnaise Salad Dressing

A creamy salad dressing made with egg yolks, oil, vinegar, lemon juice, and optional mustard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Mayonnaise Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a bowl, combine the egg yolks, salt, and cayenne pepper.

  2. Slowly add the cold salad oil drop by drop while whisking continuously.

  3. Once the mixture thickens, alternate adding lemon juice and more oil in larger quantities.

  4. If the mayonnaise curdles, mix it with another egg yolk to restore consistency.

  5. For added flavor, stir in mustard if desired.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Emulsifiers that bind the oil and water into a thick, stable sauce.
Salad oil
Forms the fat body of the sauce, giving it richness and thickness as it is whisked in.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and helps keep the emulsion stable.

The step that matters

Adding the oil slowly while whisking. Oil must be dispersed into tiny droplets among the egg yolk proteins. Adding it too fast overwhelms the yolks, so the emulsion breaks and the mayonnaise curdles.

Swap the mustard

The recipe marks mustard as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, pepper, vinegar, lemon):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Spinachfits about as well
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, pepper, vinegar, lemon. 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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