Skip to main content
Main

Corn Salad

A salad of corn, cabbage, peppers, mustard, sugar, and vinegar, boiled and canned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cabbage and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,645 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Corn Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the cabbage and add salt; let it stand to drain.

  2. Chop the peppers and cut the corn off the cobs.

  3. Stir the mustard into a little vinegar.

  4. If vinegar is very sour, dilute it with a little water.

Cook and seal

  1. Mix all ingredients together and bring to a boil.

  2. Seal in cans or bottles.

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. Cabbage + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,645 recipes

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

  2. Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

  3. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the sharp vinegar.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves and gives the salad its tang.
Ground mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavor and helps season the vinegar mixture.
Cabbage
Forms the bulk of the salad and, salted and drained, becomes crisp rather than watery.

The step that matters

Dilute very sour vinegar. Vinegar acidity varies between batches. Very sharp vinegar can make the salad overly tart, so diluting it with a little water balances the flavor while keeping enough acidity to preserve the salad.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (corn, sugar, pepper, mustard, vinegar):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Lettucefits about as well
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, sugar, pepper, mustard, vinegar. 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.

More corn salad recipes

Green 4 See all 28 →

You might also like

Corn FrittersCorn Fritters203 recipesRed CabbageRed Cabbage65 recipesStewed CabbageStewed Cabbage58 recipesBaked CabbageBaked Cabbage51 recipes