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Stuffed Cabbage

Savoy cabbage leaves stuffed with veal farce, braised and served with Spanish sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cabbage and veal work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 252 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Stuffed Cabbage

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cabbage

  1. Trim off the outside leaves of the savoy cabbage.

  2. Boil the leaves in water for about 10 minutes.

  3. Transfer the leaves to cold water.

  4. Squeeze out as much water as possible from the leaves.

Stuff and braise

  1. Take each leaf and place some veal farce between them.

  2. Form the cabbage to appear whole and tie it with string.

  3. Braise the cabbage in a light braise until tender.

  4. Drain the cabbage in a cloth.

Serve

  1. Dish the cabbage up.

  2. Pour Spanish sauce over the stuffed 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 + vealtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together252 recipes

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

  2. Veal + saucetop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,072 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (soapy, waxy).

  3. Cabbage + saucetop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together437 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Savoy cabbage
Provides the leaves that wrap the farce and hold the shape of the dish.
Veal farce
Forms the savoury stuffing that fills the cabbage between the leaves.
Spanish sauce
Adds moisture and rich flavour to the finished stuffed cabbage.

The step that matters

Squeezing out the water from the leaves. Excess water left in the blanched leaves dilutes the flavour of the farce and can make the rolls soggy during braising, so the leaves should be pressed dry before stuffing.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, sauce):

  1. Tomatofits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, sauce. 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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