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Salad

Thousand Island Dressing

A creamy salad dressing made with pimento, onion, green pepper, egg, ketchup, lemon juice, sugar, celery salt, cayenne, salt, and paprika.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Thousand Island Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the pimento, onion, green pepper, and hard cooked egg as finely as possible.

Combine and chill

  1. Combine all ingredients in a bowl.

  2. Chill the mixture before serving.

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. Lemon + celerytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  4. Walnut + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Ketchup + sugartop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together260 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Thick salad dressing
Forms the creamy base that carries all the other flavors.
Ketchup or chili sauce
Adds color, tang and sweetness to the dressing base.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the sugar.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that offsets the acidity and salt.
Hard cooked egg
Adds body and a rich, mellow texture through its chopped pieces.

The step that matters

Chop the vegetables and egg as finely as possible. Fine pieces distribute evenly through the dressing and give a smooth texture. Coarse chunks stay separate, so bites taste uneven and the dressing feels lumpy.

“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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