Skip to main content
Main

Cabbage, Bismarck Style

A braised cabbage dish with butter, onions, parsley, bay leaves, thyme, broth, and small sausages, served on toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Cabbage, Bismarck Style

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cabbage

  1. Trim the cabbage.

  2. Wash the cabbage.

  3. Quarter the cabbage.

  4. Cut off the thickest part of the stalk.

  5. Parboil the cabbage quarters for 10 minutes.

  6. Immerse the parboiled quarters in cold water.

  7. Squeeze out the water from each quarter.

  8. Tie each quarter with string to maintain shape.

Braise

  1. Place the cabbage in a saucepan.

  2. Season the cabbage with salt and pepper.

  3. Add butter, small onions, parsley, bay leaves, thyme, and a few grains of pepper.

  4. Moisten the cabbage with broth to cover.

  5. Cook slowly.

  6. When the cabbage is nearly cooked, add the small sausages.

  7. Once everything is thoroughly cooked, remove the cabbage.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Place the cabbage on pieces of toast with the onions and sausages around them.

  2. Strain the gravy into another saucepan.

  3. Remove the grease from the gravy.

  4. Reduce and thicken the gravy lightly.

  5. Pour the gravy over the 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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Cabbage + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

  5. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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 becomes tender through slow moist cooking.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the braising liquid and the finished dish.
Small onions
Contribute sweetness and aroma as they soften in the braising liquid.
Small sausages
Add savory flavor and meaty richness to the dish.
Broth
Provides moisture and savory flavor as the cabbage braises.

The step that matters

Cook slowly. Gentle, slow cooking in moist liquid lets the cabbage become tender and sweet without breaking apart or drying out. Rapid boiling can make it mushy and bitter.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, butter, onion, parsley, thyme):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, onion, parsley, thyme. 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

Red CabbageRed Cabbage65 recipesStewed CabbageStewed Cabbage58 recipesBaked CabbageBaked Cabbage51 recipesCabbage DressingCabbage Dressing19 recipes