Name: Red Salad
Ingredients: 1 quart cabbage; 1 pint chopped boiled beets; ⅓ cup horseradish; pepper to taste; coarse sea salt to taste

Why it works: Cabbage and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 481 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Red Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Chop the cabbage and boiled beets separately.
In a bowl, combine the chopped cabbage, beets, horseradish, pepper, and coarse sea salt. Mix well to combine.

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 + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together481 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,081 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Horseradish + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,646 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Cabbage: Provides the crisp, fresh bulk that gives the salad its body.
Beets: Add earthy sweetness and the characteristic deep red color.
Horseradish: Adds sharp heat and pungency that cuts through the sweetness of the beets.