Name: Fried Cabbage
Ingredients: 1 head of cabbage, chopped finely; pepper to taste; coarse sea salt to taste; 1 slice of fat bacon

Why it works: Cabbage and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,081 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Fried Cabbage

Ingredients

1 head of cabbage, chopped finely
pepper to taste
coarse sea salt to taste
1 slice of fat bacon

Directions

Chop the cabbage finely.
Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.
Fry in a skillet with the slice of fat bacon until browned.

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 + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,081 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 browns in the rendered bacon fat.
Fat bacon: Adds fat for frying and savory flavor as it renders into 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.