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Salad

Beet Salad

A salad of chopped cabbage and boiled beets sweetened with sugar, seasoned with salt, pepper, horseradish, and dressed with cold vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 481 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Beet Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a large bowl, combine chopped cabbage and boiled beets.

  2. Add sugar, salt, pepper, and grated horseradish to the bowl, then mix well to combine all ingredients.

  3. Cover the mixture with cold vinegar.

  4. Seal the container and refrigerate.

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 + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together481 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Pepper + horseradishtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Horseradish + vinegartop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Boiled beets
Provide earthy sweetness and the deep red colour of the salad.
Chopped cabbage
Adds crisp texture and bulk to the salad.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharp vinegar.
Cold vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and keeps the salad tangy.
Grated horseradish
Adds sharp, pungent heat that cuts through the sweetness.

Swap the horseradish

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Radishfits about as well
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, sugar, pepper, vinegar. 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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