Skip to main content
Main

Sweet and Sour Cabbage

A cabbage dish cooked with apples, sugar, vinegar, and flour, served hot with potato dumplings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Sweet and Sour Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Shred the cabbage finely.

  2. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

  3. Add the sliced apples.

Cook

  1. Heat the fat in a skillet.

  2. Add the cabbage and apples to the skillet.

  3. Pour boiling water over them.

  4. Cook until tender.

  5. Sprinkle the flour over the mixture.

  6. Add sugar and vinegar.

  7. Cook a little longer.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with potato dumplings.

  2. If using red cabbage, pour boiling water over it two or three times to reduce the color.

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

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

  2. Cabbage + appletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together235 recipes

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

  3. Cabbage + vinegartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,924 recipes

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

  4. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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 softens into tender strands as it cooks.
Sour apples
Add acidity and tartness that balance the sugar and vinegar.
Fat
Carries flavor and keeps the cabbage from sticking as it cooks.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that contrasts with the sour notes of vinegar and apples.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that gives the dish its sour character.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a light sauce that coats the cabbage.

The step that matters

Pour boiling water over red cabbage repeatedly. Red cabbage colors are acid-and-pH sensitive; repeated hot water rinses dilute and wash away pigments that would otherwise turn the dish dull or muddy when sweetened and cooked.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, sugar, vinegar, pepper, flour):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, sugar, vinegar, pepper, flour. 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 recipesApple SoupApple Soup33 recipes