Name: Cream Slaw
Ingredients: ½ gallon cabbage, finely chopped; 1½ pints thick sweet cream; Salt to taste; Pepper to taste; 2 teaspoons celery seed or 1 stalk celery, finely chopped; ⅔ cup sugar; ⅔ cup good cider vinegar

Why it works: Pepper and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Cream Slaw

Ingredients

Directions

Combine the chopped cabbage and thick sweet cream in a large bowl.
Add salt, pepper, celery seed (or chopped celery), sugar, and cider vinegar to the cream.
Pour the cream mixture over the cabbage and stir thoroughly.
Serve immediately.

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.

Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together16,012 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,081 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Cabbage + celerytop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,840 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,431 recipes

Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).
Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Cabbage: Provides the crisp, bulky body of the slaw.
Thick sweet cream: Forms the rich, creamy dressing that coats the cabbage.
Sugar: Adds sweetness to balance the vinegar's sharpness.
Cider vinegar: Adds acidity that brightens the cream and sharpens the flavor.

Swap the cabbage

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

Mustardfits better
Capsicumfits better
Horseradishfits about as well
Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, pepper, celery, sugar, cider, 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.