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To Boil Cabbage

A simple boiled cabbage dish seasoned with salt and served with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,397 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

To Boil Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the cabbage in cold water and pick over it carefully.

  2. Place the whole cabbage in a covered pot with the stem end down.

  3. Sprinkle the cabbage well with salt and pour 1 cup of cold water over it.

Cook and dry

  1. Boil until very tender, then uncover to allow the water to boil away.

  2. Set the cabbage on the back of the stove to dry.

  3. Remove the coarse outer leaves, then cut the cabbage into halves or quarters.

Serve

  1. Serve in a hot, deep dish with butter on each piece.

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. Cabbage + buttertop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,397 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Cabbage
Forms the whole dish; boiling softens its fibres until very tender.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that coats each piece of cabbage.

The step that matters

Boiling until very tender. Cabbage needs a long, steady boil to break down its tough cell walls. Stopping early leaves it fibrous and firm, while the uncovered drying afterward lets excess water evaporate so the cabbage is not waterlogged.

“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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