Name: Cabbage Salad
Ingredients: 1 head of cabbage; 2 hard boiled eggs

Why it works: Cabbage and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,391 recipes. Both carry 2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cabbage Salad

Ingredients

1 head of cabbage
2 hard boiled eggs

Directions

Slice the cabbage finely.
Slice the hard boiled eggs.
Combine the cabbage and eggs in a bowl and toss gently to mix.

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 + eggtop 32% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,391 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cabbage: Forms the crisp, bulky base of the salad and provides most of its texture.
Eggs: Add richness and a soft, creamy contrast to the crisp cabbage.

“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.