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Creamed Cabbage

A cabbage dish cooked in boiling water, then finished with cream, salt, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and flour work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 978 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Creamed Cabbage

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cabbage

  1. Slice the cabbage coarser than for slaw.

  2. Pour boiling water over the cabbage and boil for 10 minutes.

  3. Drain the cabbage and cover it with fresh water.

  4. Boil for another 20 minutes and drain again.

Finish the dish

  1. Pour ½ cup of cream over the cabbage.

  2. Season with coarse sea salt and thicken slightly with flour.

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 + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together978 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Cream + flourtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  3. Cabbage + creamtop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together778 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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 turns soft and tender through prolonged boiling.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, coating texture to the cooked cabbage.
Flour
Thickens the cream so it clings to the cabbage instead of pooling.

The step that matters

Thicken with flour. Flour needs to be stirred in evenly and cooked briefly so it thickens the cream without leaving raw starch taste or lumps. Adding it all at once or unevenly causes clumping.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, flour):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, 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.

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