Name: Boiled Cabbage
Ingredients: 1 head of cabbage; 1 piece of beef or pork

Why it works: Cabbage and beef work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 872 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Boiled Cabbage

Ingredients

1 head of cabbage
1 piece of beef or pork

Directions

Cut the cabbage into quarters and remove the heart, checking for insects.
Boil the cabbage with the piece of beef or pork for about 2 hours.

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.

Cabbage + beeftop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together872 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

Cabbage: Forms the bulk of the dish and turns soft and mildly sweet as it cooks.
Beef or pork: Flavors the cooking liquid and adds richness as it simmers with the cabbage.

“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.