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Salad

Cream Salad

A cabbage salad with a creamy mustard and sour cream sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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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 ↓

Cream Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. In a saucepan, boil the vinegar, sugar, and butter.

  2. Stir in the well-beaten egg, sour cream, flour, mustard, and salt.

  3. Cook the mixture thoroughly.

Assemble and serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the shaved cabbage.

  2. Serve the salad cold or hot, adding the cream just before mixing if desired.

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. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Cream + buttertop 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
Cooked egg proteins set and thicken the dressing, giving it body.
Flour
Starch thickens the sauce and helps it hold together when cooled.
Sour cream
Adds creamy richness and a tangy flavour that coats the cabbage.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that sharpens the dressing and balances the richness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that rounds out the sharpness of the vinegar.
Cabbage
Supplies the crisp, fresh bulk that the dressing clings to.

The step that matters

Cook the mixture thoroughly. Egg proteins must be fully heated to set and thicken the sauce and to make the egg safe to eat. Underheating leaves the dressing thin and raw-tasting, while overheating can curdle it.

Swap the cabbage

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

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

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