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Salad

Hot Slaw

A slaw made with bacon, cabbage, vinegar, salt, and optional onion.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Hot Slaw

Why it works: Cabbage and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,001 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Hot Slaw

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the bacon into small pieces and fry until the grease is rendered.

  2. Chop the cabbage and sprinkle with coarse sea salt; let it sit for 15 minutes.

Dress and serve

  1. Pour the hot bacon and grease over the cabbage.

  2. Heat the vinegar in the same pan used for the bacon and pour it over the cabbage.

  3. Add chopped onion 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.

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 + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,001 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. Vinegar + oniontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,226 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Bacon
Its rendered fat carries flavour and coats the cabbage, while the crisp pieces add savoury richness.
Cabbage
Provides the bulk of the slaw; salting softens its texture so it becomes tender and pliable.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dish and balances the richness of the bacon fat.

The step that matters

Salting the cabbage and letting it rest. Salt draws water out of the cabbage through osmosis, softening its cell walls. Resting for the full 15 minutes lets it wilt enough to become tender rather than crunchy and raw.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, vinegar):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Radishfits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, 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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