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Salad

Sweet Cabbage Salad

A salad of chopped cabbage dressed with a sweet vinegar and mustard sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

Sweet Cabbage Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. Combine vinegar, sugar, mustard, and salt in a saucepan and bring to a boil.

  2. Add the well-beaten eggs and sweet milk, then boil again.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture over the chopped cabbage.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Vinegar + cabbagetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

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

  4. Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Vinegar
Provides the sharp acidity that balances the sugar in the dressing.
Sugar
Sweetens the dressing and balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Eggs
Thicken the dressing as they cook, giving it a creamy body.
Sweet milk
Adds richness and moisture, softening the acidity of the dressing.
Chopped cabbage
Forms the base of the salad that the hot dressing is poured over.

The step that matters

Adding the eggs and milk, then boiling again. Egg proteins thicken when heated but can curdle or scramble if the mixture boils too hard or too long, leaving the dressing grainy instead of smooth.

Swap the cabbage

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, sugar, mustard, egg, milk. 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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