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Salad

Winter Salad

A cabbage, beet, celery, and egg salad dressed with a horseradish, sugar, mustard, vinegar, and butter sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Horseradish and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Winter Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the salad

  1. In a large bowl, combine the cabbage, beet root, celery, and minced eggs.

  2. Add the horseradish, brown sugar, and dry mustard; mix well.

Make the dressing

  1. In a saucepan, break the egg and add the vinegar and butter.

  2. Stir over low heat until thickened, but do not boil.

Serve

  1. Pour the dressing over the salad, toss lightly, and serve cold.

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. Horseradish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Celery + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Cabbage + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together481 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Cabbage + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,645 recipes

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

  5. Celery + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg
Thickens the vinegar dressing as it cooks gently, giving it a creamy body.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that balances the sweetness and earthy flavor of the beets.
Beet root
Provides the main vegetable bulk and the deep color of the salad.
Cabbage
Supplies crisp texture and bulk to the salad.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness that offsets the vinegar's sharpness.

The step that matters

Stir the dressing over low heat without boiling. Egg proteins set gently as they warm; if the mixture boils, the egg can curdle and turn grainy instead of smoothly thickening.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Chestnutfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Lentilsfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, celery, egg, horseradish, sugar, mustard, vinegar. 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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