Skip to main content

Cabbage Salad

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cabbage and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,840 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Cabbage Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Shred the cabbage as you would for coleslaw.

  2. Add a little shredded onion and some chopped celery.

  3. Mix well with mayonnaise dressing.

  4. Serve in salad dishes.

  5. Top with sliced hard boiled eggs or pignolia nuts 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.

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 + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,840 recipes

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

  2. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Cabbage + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,001 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Celery + nutstop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together169 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Onion + nutstop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together114 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Sesamefits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, onion, celery, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

More cabbage salad recipes

You might also like