Skip to main content
Main

Cabbage Boiled in Meat Liquor

Cabbage boiled in a broth made from corned beef or ham, served with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cabbage and beef work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 872 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cabbage Boiled in Meat Liquor

Ingredients

Directions

Make the broth

  1. Boil corned beef or ham in water.

  2. Remove the meat and skim off the grease.

Cook and serve

  1. Add the cabbage to the boiling liquor.

  2. Boil briskly for 1.5 hours until the cabbage sinks to the bottom.

  3. Drain well and serve with butter on top.

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 + beeftop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together872 recipes

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

  2. Butter + beeftop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  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 bulk of the dish and turns tender and sweet as it simmers in the broth.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the cooked cabbage at serving.
Corned beef or ham
Flavours the boiling liquor, which becomes the broth the cabbage cooks in.

The step that matters

Boil briskly for 1.5 hours until the cabbage sinks to the bottom. Long, vigorous boiling softens the tough cabbage fibres fully. Stopping early leaves it firm and gives a raw, bitter taste. Sinking shows the cabbage has absorbed liquid and become tender.

Swap the cabbage

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Onionfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, beef. 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.

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesBeef BrothBeef Broth67 recipes