Skip to main content
Salad

Cream Salad

A cabbage salad dressed with a creamy mixture of cream, vinegar, egg yolks, sugar, mustard, and salt.

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 ↓

Cream Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the salad

  1. Chop the cabbage finely.

  2. Stir the cream and salt into the cabbage.

Make the dressing and serve

  1. Heat the vinegar and stir in the beaten egg yolks, sugar, and mustard.

  2. Pour the mixture over the cabbage just before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Cabbage + vinegartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

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

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

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

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 its crisp texture.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy body to the salad.
Egg yolks
Thicken the warm vinegar mixture into a creamy dressing through gentle heat.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the dressing its tangy flavour.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with sweetness.

The step that matters

Heating the vinegar and egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken when gently heated but can scramble if the mixture gets too hot or is heated too fast. Stirring steadily while warming keeps the dressing smooth and creamy.

Swap the cabbage

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

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

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