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Soup

Vegetable Salad

A salad of chopped cabbage, pickles, apples, onions, boiled eggs, and a dressing of flour, butter, milk, eggs, sugar, mustard, salt, pepper, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Vegetable Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Chop the cabbage, pickles, apples, boiled eggs, and onion.

  2. Rub the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs into the chopped vegetables.

  3. Sift 1 tablespoon of flour over the mixture.

Make the dressing

  1. In a saucepan, combine 1 tablespoon of flour, ½ cup of butter, and 1 cup of milk. Boil the mixture until it creams.

  2. Beat together the 2 eggs, sugar, mustard, salt, and pepper. In a separate saucepan, heat ½ cup of hot vinegar and add the egg mixture. Boil the mixture for 15 minutes.

  3. Let the dressing cool.

Assemble and serve

  1. Pour the dressing over the vegetables. Serve in tomato or pepper shells.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Cabbage + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,001 recipes

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

  3. Apple + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  4. Cabbage + appletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together235 recipes

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

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Hard-boiled yolks and beaten eggs add richness and body to the dressing and salad.
Butter
Fat that enriches the flour-thickened base of the dressing.
Flour
Thickens the milk and butter mixture into a creamy base for the dressing.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the creamy dressing with the flour and butter.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the dressing its tang and balances the sugar.
Apples
Add crisp texture and a mild sweetness to the chopped vegetable mixture.

The step that matters

Boil the egg mixture for 15 minutes. Eggs thicken as their proteins set with heat. Too little heat leaves the dressing thin, while overheating can curdle it into lumps, so keep it at a steady boil and stir.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, apple, egg, flour, butter, milk, sugar):

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, apple, egg, flour, butter, milk, sugar. 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 vegetable salad recipes

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