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Salad

Hot Polish Salad

A shredded cabbage salad cooked in hot goose fat, seasoned with vinegar, salt, pepper, and finished with 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

Prepare

  1. Cut the red cabbage into shreds.

  2. Melt the goose dripping in a pan.

Cook and finish

  1. Season the melted fat with vinegar, coarse sea salt, and pepper.

  2. Add the cabbage to the hot mixture and let it simmer.

  3. 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 bulk of the salad and becomes tender as it simmers in the hot fat.
Goose dripping
Provides the cooking fat and carries flavour through the warm dressing.
Egg yolks
Enrich the dressing, adding richness and a creamier texture when stirred in.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet, earthy flavour of the cabbage.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolks just before serving. Egg yolks thicken when heated, so adding them to a very hot mixture too early can scramble them. Stirring them in at the end lets the residual heat enrich the dressing gently.

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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