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A Nice Way to Cook Cabbage

Boiled cabbage topped with a butter, vinegar, mustard, sugar, and egg dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and mustard 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 ↓

A Nice Way to Cook Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the cabbage

  1. Cook the cabbage in salted water until tender.

Make the egg butter dressing

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over low heat.

  2. Add vinegar, mustard, and sugar to the melted butter and stir well.

  3. Once boiling, stir in the beaten eggs until combined.

  4. Pour the dressing over the cooked cabbage.

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 + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,645 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 becomes tender when cooked in salted water.
Eggs
Thicken the dressing as they cook, giving it a creamy, lightly set texture.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth body to the dressing.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that balances the richness of the butter and eggs.

The step that matters

Stirring the beaten eggs into the boiling dressing. Eggs thicken when heated, but if they get too hot too fast they can scramble into lumps. Stirring steadily while adding them keeps the dressing smooth and creamy.

Swap the cabbage

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

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

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