Skip to main content
Salad

Cabbage Salad

A cabbage salad with a custard mixture of butter, mustard, vinegar, sugar, cayenne pepper, eggs, and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mustard and cabbage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,645 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cabbage Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add mustard mixed with a little vinegar, sugar, and cayenne pepper.

  3. Stir in the beaten eggs and cook until thickened.

Assemble the salad

  1. In a bowl, season the chopped cabbage with salt and pepper.

  2. Fold in the custard mixture and then add the whipped cream. Mix everything together well.

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. Mustard + cabbagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,645 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + cabbagetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

  3. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Thicken into a custard when cooked, giving the dressing body.
Sour vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the dressing and balances the sugar.
Whipped cream
Adds richness and a light, airy texture to the dressing.
Cabbage
Provides the crisp, fibrous base that the dressing coats.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the custard base.

The step that matters

Cooking the custard until thickened. Egg proteins set with gentle heat, but if the custard gets too hot it can curdle and turn grainy. Stirring constantly and removing it once thickened keeps it smooth before it is folded into the cabbage.

Swap the cabbage

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

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, butter, mustard, sugar, pepper, egg, cream. 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.

You might also like

Cabbage DressingCabbage Dressing9 recipesChicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipes