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Salad

Hot Polish Salad

A hot salad of shredded red cabbage flavored with goose dripping, vinegar, salt, pepper, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,081 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Hot Polish Salad

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the goose dripping in a pan.

  2. Season with vinegar, coarse sea salt, and pepper.

  3. Add the shredded cabbage and let it simmer until hot.

  4. Stir in a few egg yolks just before serving.

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 + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 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 + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Red cabbage
Forms the main body of the salad and carries the flavour of the dressing.
Goose dripping
Adds fat that coats the cabbage and carries savoury flavour into the dish.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and keeps the red colour bright.
Egg yolks
Add richness and a creamy texture when stirred into the warm cabbage.

The step that matters

Stir in a few egg yolks just before serving. Yolks thicken and enrich when warm but can scramble if overheated. Adding them off the heat, just before serving, gives a creamy coating instead of cooked bits of egg.

Swap the cabbage

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, vinegar, pepper, 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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