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Filled Cabbage

A cabbage head stuffed with chestnuts, sausages, and fieldfares, boiled in bouillon and served with a butter-marrow sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and chestnut work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 40 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Filled Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and stuff

  1. Remove the core from the cabbage head to create space for the filling.

  2. Stuff the cabbage with fieldfares, sausages, and chestnuts.

Cook and serve

  1. Tie the cabbage and boil it in bouillon for 2 hours.

  2. In a separate pan, prepare a butter sauce and mix it with the melted and strained marrow.

  3. Cook the sauce until it thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon.

  4. Pour the sauce over the cabbage before serving.

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 + chestnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together40 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Chestnut + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together965 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cabbage
Forms the outer wrapper that holds the filling together during boiling.
Marrow
Adds richness and fat to the butter sauce, giving it body and flavour.
Butter
Forms the base of the sauce, adding fat and a smooth texture.
Bouillon
Cooks the cabbage and filling in liquid, adding savoury flavour to the dish.

The step that matters

Cook the sauce until it thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon. Sauces thicken as starch and fat emulsify and reduce; stopping too early leaves it thin and runny, while overcooking can make it grainy or break.

Swap the cabbage

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against chestnut, 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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