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Salad

Celery and Cabbage Salad

A salad of chopped white cabbage and celery with capers, seasoned with salt and pepper, dressed in mayonnaise, served on lettuce leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Capers and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 372 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Celery and Cabbage Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop and mix equal parts of white cabbage and celery.

  2. Drain the mixture and add 1 small bottle of capers.

Dress and serve

  1. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

  2. Moisten thoroughly with mayonnaise dressing.

  3. Arrange the salad on crisp lettuce leaves.

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. Capers + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together372 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cabbage + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together622 recipes

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

  3. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

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

White cabbage
Provides the crisp, crunchy bulk of the salad.
Celery
Adds crunch and a fresh, mildly savory flavour.
Capers
Add a sharp, briny acidity that cuts through the mayonnaise.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds fat and moisture, binding the vegetables into a creamy salad.

The step that matters

Drain the mixture before dressing. Cabbage and celery release water as they sit. If they are not drained well, the moisture thins the mayonnaise dressing and makes the salad watery.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (celery, capers, pepper, lettuce):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, capers, pepper, 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.

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