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Stewed Savoy Cabbage

A simple stew of Savoy cabbage cooked with butter, bouillon, sugar, nutmeg, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and nutmeg work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 187 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Stewed Savoy Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the outer leaves from the cabbage and cut through the head to remove the stalk.

  2. Wash the cabbage and boil it in salted water until tender.

  3. Drain the cabbage in a colander and rinse with boiling water, then press dry.

Stew

  1. Stew the cabbage with butter, bouillon, sugar, nutmeg, and salt until heated through.

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 + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together187 recipes

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

  2. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Nutmeg + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

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

Nutmeg and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 23,364 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Savoy cabbage
Forms the body of the stew and softens into tender strands when boiled and stewed.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, rounding out the flavour of the cabbage.
Bouillon
Supplies the liquid that moistens and seasons the cabbage as it stews.
Sugar
Adds a touch of sweetness that balances the cabbage's natural bitterness.

The step that matters

Pressing the cabbage dry. Excess water left in boiled cabbage would dilute the bouillon and butter, leaving the stew thin and watery. Pressing removes that water so the stew stays concentrated and well flavoured.

Swap the cabbage

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, nutmeg, 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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