Vinaigrette

The Fifth Mother

Appears in
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Ruhlman's Twenty

By Michael Ruhlman

Published 2011

  • About

FOR DECADES IN THE UNITED STATES, we’ve known this tart combination of oil, vinegar, and flavorings as salad dressing. Yet what I grew up seeing in store-bought bottles in the refrigerator door in the 1970s can be a fantastic sauce on anything—on steak, on pork, on chicken, on green vegetables, on starchy vegetables, with cheese, and, in principle at least, on desserts. It even works, yes, on salad.

The principle is simple. One of the key flavor components in any dish is acidity, along with salty, sweet, bitter, and savory flavors. We also evaluate the pleasure of a dish according to textural categories: crunchy or soft, smooth or coarse, fat or lean. A vinaigrette combines two of the most important of those qualities, acidity and fat. After that, it’s simply a matter of flavoring a vinaigrette. The vinaigrette is so variable and so versatile that one way to think about it is as a mother sauce.