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Dessert

Cooked Oil Salad Dressing

A thickened salad dressing made with flour, oil, lemon juice, water, egg, sugar, salt, mustard, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Cooked Oil Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Mix the flour with 2 tablespoons of the oil until smooth.

  2. Add the lemon juice and water.

  3. Place the mixture in a double boiler.

  4. Cook until thick, stirring constantly.

Finish the dressing

  1. Remove from heat and combine with the well-beaten egg.

  2. Blend in the sugar, salt, mustard, and cayenne pepper.

  3. Add the remaining oil.

  4. Beat all together until well combined.

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Flour + mustardtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,066 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the cooked mixture so the dressing becomes smooth and body-rich.
Egg
Adds richness and helps emulsify and thicken the dressing as it is combined.
Cooking oil
Provides fat for richness and mouthfeel and helps keep the dressing smooth.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the sugar.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the lemon juice.

The step that matters

Cook until thick, stirring constantly. Flour thickens only when heated enough and stirring prevents lumps and scorching on the bottom of the pan. Stopping early leaves the dressing thin and pasty.

Swap the mustard

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, lemon, egg, sugar, 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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