Name: Cabbage Salad
Ingredients: 1 medium head of cabbage; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; dash of paprika; 1 cup sour cream; mayonnaise to taste

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

Chop the cabbage.
Add salt and a dash of paprika.

Make the dressing and combine

In a separate bowl, beat the sour cream until it foams.
Stir the foamed sour cream into the cabbage mixture.
Add mayonnaise to achieve the desired flavor.

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: Forms the bulk of the salad and provides the crisp texture.
Sour cream: Adds creamy richness and a tangy flavor to the dressing.
Mayonnaise: Adds extra richness and fat, rounding out the dressing's flavor.

“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.