Skip to main content
Salad

Sweet Cabbage Salad

A salad of chopped cabbage dressed with a boiled vinegar, sugar, mustard, salt, egg, and sweet milk mixture.

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

Why it works: Mustard and cabbage 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 ↓

Sweet Cabbage Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. Combine vinegar, sugar, mustard, and salt in a saucepan.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Add the beaten eggs and sweet milk, then boil again.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture over the chopped cabbage.

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. Mustard + cabbagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,645 recipes

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

  2. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Vinegar + cabbagetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

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

  4. Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 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

Eggs
Cooked egg proteins set and thicken the dressing into a creamy coating.
Vinegar
Provides the sharp acidity that balances the sweetness of the dressing.
Sugar
Sweetens the dressing and balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Sweet milk
Adds moisture and richness, softening the dressing's sharp flavor.
Chopped cabbage
Forms the bulk of the salad and provides its crisp texture.

The step that matters

Add the beaten eggs and sweet milk, then boil again. Egg proteins thicken the dressing as they cook, but at high heat they can curdle or scramble. Keep the mixture stirred and cook it only until it thickens so it stays smooth.

Swap the cabbage

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

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, sugar, mustard, egg, milk. 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.

You might also like

Cabbage DressingCabbage Dressing9 recipesChicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipes