Name: Cabbage Salad
Ingredients: 1 head of cabbage; salt; water; boiled dressing or mayonnaise; a little cream (optional)

Why it works: Cabbage and cream work together. They rank in the top 31% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 778 recipes. Both carry acetic acid, which smells sour, vinegar. The science ↓

Cabbage Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Wash the cabbage leaves well in salt and water.
Chop the cabbage finely.

Dress and serve

Mix the chopped cabbage with boiled dressing or mayonnaise.
Add a little cream for extra flavor, if desired.

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.

Cabbage + creamtop 31% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together778 recipes

Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Cabbage: Provides the crisp, fibrous bulk that gives the salad its crunch.
Mayonnaise or boiled dressing: Adds fat and creaminess, coating the cabbage and adding moisture.

“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.