Name: Cress and Cabbage Salad
Ingredients: finely sliced cabbage; water cress; tuliped radishes; Hygia dressing

Why it works: Cabbage and radish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Cress and Cabbage Salad

Ingredients

finely sliced cabbage
water cress
tuliped radishes
Hygia dressing

Directions

Assemble the salad

Line a salad bowl with finely sliced cabbage.
Cover the cabbage with water cress, layering until the bowl is filled.

Finish and serve

Decorate with tuliped radishes.
Drizzle with Hygia dressing.

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 + radishtop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together106 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Finely sliced cabbage: Forms the base layer and bulk of the salad.
Water cress: Adds peppery flavour and fresh, crisp texture in layers.
Tuliped radishes: Add crisp texture and a sharp, peppery bite as decoration.
Hygia dressing: Adds moisture and flavour over the salad.

“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.