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Salad

Cream Slaw

A cabbage salad with a boiled vinegar and butter sauce mixed with eggs, sour cream, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Cream Slaw

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. In a saucepan, combine vinegar, sugar, and butter; bring to a boil.

  2. In a bowl, mix eggs, sour cream, and flour until well combined.

  3. Stir the egg mixture into the boiling vinegar mixture and boil thoroughly.

Assemble the slaw

  1. Sprinkle the finely cut cabbage with salt, pepper, and mustard.

  2. Pour the hot mixture over the cabbage and mix well.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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
Thicken the dressing as they set during boiling, giving it a creamy body.
Sour cream
Adds richness and a tangy creaminess to the dressing.
Vinegar
Provides the acidity that sharpens the dressing and balances the sweetness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to offset the acidity of the vinegar.
Flour
Stabilises the dressing so it stays smooth rather than separating.
Cabbage
Forms the bulk of the slaw, carrying the dressing.

The step that matters

Boil the egg mixture thoroughly after stirring it in. Eggs only thicken when heated enough to set their proteins. Stirring cold egg into the boiling vinegar and boiling it through cooks the eggs and gives the dressing its body; undercooked egg leaves it thin and may curdle or stay loose.

Swap the cabbage

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, cream, sugar, flour, egg, butter, walnut. 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.

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