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Cream Cabbage

A cabbage dish topped with a thickened milk, butter, egg, vinegar, mustard, pepper, and salt sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and cabbage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,645 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cream Cabbage

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine milk, butter, egg, vinegar, dry mustard, pepper, and salt.

  2. Cook the sauce over medium heat until it thickens, then remove from heat.

Assemble and serve

  1. Chop the raw cabbage finely and place it in a serving bowl.

  2. Pour the hot sauce over the chopped cabbage and mix well.

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. Mustard + cabbagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,645 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + cabbagetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 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

Egg
Thickens the sauce as it cooks and gives it a rich, creamy body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the sauce feel smooth and silky.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens when heated.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that balances the richness of the cream sauce.
Raw cabbage
Provides the crisp, fresh-textured base that the warm sauce is poured over.

The step that matters

Cook the sauce until it thickens, then remove from heat. The egg proteins set as the sauce heats, which thickens it. If it overheats or cooks too long, the egg can scramble and the sauce turns grainy, so it must be taken off the heat once thick.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, egg, vinegar, mustard, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, egg, vinegar, mustard, pepper. 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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