Skip to main content
Salad

Delicious Cabbage Salad

A cabbage salad dressed with a creamy egg, butter, sugar, vinegar, and mustard mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Delicious Cabbage Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. In a saucepan, combine the egg, butter, sugar, vinegar, cream, mustard, pepper, and salt.

  2. Cook over medium heat, stirring, until the mixture thickens.

Serve

  1. Pour the hot mixture over the chopped cabbage and serve immediately.

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. Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  5. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg
Thickens the dressing as it cooks and sets it into a creamy custard.
Cabbage
Provides the crisp, bulky base that the warm dressing coats.
Thick sweet cream
Adds richness and body, making the dressing smooth and creamy.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavor and balances the sweetness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that offsets the sharpness of the vinegar.

The step that matters

Cook the dressing gently while stirring. The egg thickens the mixture only within a narrow temperature range. Heating it too fast or without stirring can scramble the egg, leaving lumps instead of a smooth, creamy dressing.

Swap the cabbage

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

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

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