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Hot Cabbage Salad

A hot salad of finely shredded cabbage cooked with bacon fat or goose grease, seasoned with pepper, salt, vinegar, and finished with egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,081 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Hot Cabbage Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the red cabbage into very fine strips.

  2. Mix the cabbage with melted bacon fat or goose grease, seasoning with pepper, salt, and vinegar.

Cook and serve

  1. Place the mixture in an earthenware cooking pot and keep it by the fire until the cabbage is thoroughly soft.

  2. Stir in the yolks of two eggs just before serving.

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

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

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

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

  3. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

  4. Cabbage + eggtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,391 recipes

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

  5. Vinegar + eggtop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Vinegar and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,922 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

Red cabbage
Forms the bulk of the salad and softens into a tender, moist texture as it cooks.
Bacon fat or goose grease
Adds richness and moisture, coating the cabbage and helping it soften evenly.
Egg yolks
Stirred in at the end to enrich the dressing and give it a creamy body.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and brightens the rich fat.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg yolks just before serving. Egg yolks thicken and enrich when gently warmed, but if they sit in very hot mixture too long they can scramble or curdle. Adding them last keeps the dressing smooth and creamy.

Swap the cabbage

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Cucumberfits about as well
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, vinegar, egg. 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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