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Boiled Cabbage

Boiled cabbage is cooked by simmering cabbage leaves in salted, sugared butter water for two hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Boiled Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and separate the cabbage leaf by leaf.

  2. Place the cabbage in an inner saucepan with salt, sugar, butter, and boiling water.

  3. Cover the saucepan loosely with a lid.

  4. Boil water in an outer saucepan and place the inner saucepan inside it.

Cook and serve

  1. Cook for 2 hours.

  2. Drain the cabbage in a colander, shaking gently.

  3. Reserve the liquid for soup stock or sauce.

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. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Cabbage + buttertop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,397 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Cabbage + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 through long, gentle cooking.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour through the cabbage.
Castor sugar
Adds a touch of sweetness that softens the cabbage's sharper bitterness.

The step that matters

Keep the water in the outer saucepan boiling. The inner saucepan cooks gently by steam and hot water from the outer pot. If the outer water stops boiling, the cabbage cooks too slowly and may stay under-tender over the long cooking time.

Swap the cabbage

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter. 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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