Skip to main content
Salad

Cold Slaw

Cold Slaw is a chilled cabbage salad with hard‑boiled eggs, sweet cream, mustard, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Cold Slaw

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 ↓

Cold Slaw

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cabbage

  1. Finely shave and chop the cabbage to fill a large vegetable dish.

Make the dressing

  1. Mix the egg yolks with cold water until smooth.

  2. Gradually add sweet cream, mustard, sugar, salt, butter, and pepper to the yolks.

  3. Heat the mixture in a small saucepan until it comes to a boil.

Finish and serve

  1. Pour the hot sauce over the cabbage in the serving dish.

  2. Add vinegar and stir in bruised celery seed or celery vinegar.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

Eggs
Yolks thicken the cooked sauce and give it a smooth, creamy body.
Sweet cream
Adds richness and moisture, softening the sharpness of the vinegar.
Butter
Adds fat for a smooth, rounded mouthfeel in the cooked sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the slaw its tang and balances the richness.
Cabbage
Forms the bulk of the dish, absorbing the dressing while keeping a crisp bite.

The step that matters

Heating the sauce to a boil. Egg yolks thicken as they heat, but if the sauce gets too hot or is overcooked, the yolks can scramble and turn grainy. Stirring steadily and watching for the point of thickening helps keep it smooth.

Swap the cabbage

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, cream, mustard, sugar, butter, 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.

More cold slaw recipes

Dressing 49 See all 157 →

You might also like

Cabbage DressingCabbage Dressing9 recipesChicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipes