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Salad

Handy Salad Dressing

A vinaigrette-style dressing made with vinegar, egg yolks, butter, seasoning, cream, salt, mustard, and red pepper.

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

Handy Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. Heat the vinegar slightly.

  2. Add the well-beaten yolks and beat constantly until it thickens a little.

  3. Remove from heat and add the butter and seasoning, beating well until it cools slightly.

Finish and store

  1. Whip the cream until stiff and add about ¼ of the dressing, beating until smooth.

  2. Mix the whipped cream into the salad and save a spoonful to top each portion served.

  3. Store any remaining dressing in a covered jar in a cool place for several weeks.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  4. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the dressing as they cook gently with the warm vinegar, giving it body.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the dressing.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that gives the dressing its tangy flavour.
Thick cream
Whipped into the dressing, it lightens the texture and mellows the sharpness.

The step that matters

Thickening the yolks over heat. Egg yolks thicken when gently heated, but if they get too hot they can scramble into lumps. Beating constantly spreads the heat evenly and keeps the dressing smooth.

Swap the mustard

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, egg, butter, cream, 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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