Name: Cabbage Salad
Ingredients: 4 cups chopped cabbage; 1 cup cream, beaten or whipped; 1 tablespoon powdered sugar; 2 teaspoons salt; ½ teaspoon pepper; juice of 1 lemon; lettuce for serving

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Cabbage Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Marinate the chopped cabbage with the lemon juice.
Blend in the cream, powdered sugar, salt, and pepper.
Serve the mixture on a bed of lettuce.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Cabbage + lettucetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together622 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,081 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Pepper + lettucetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,037 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Lemon + lettucetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,559 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

Cabbage: Forms the crisp, bulky body of the salad.
Cream: Adds richness and a smooth, creamy coating to the cabbage.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and softens the cabbage slightly while marinating.
Powdered sugar: Adds gentle sweetness that balances the acidity of the lemon.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, sugar, pepper, lemon, lettuce):

Spinachfits better
Beetrootfits better
Mustardfits better
Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sugar, pepper, lemon, lettuce. 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.