Name: Stuffed Cabbage
Ingredients: 1 large cabbage; cold chicken or any cold meat, finely chopped; seasoning to taste

Why it works: Cabbage and chicken work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 436 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Stuffed Cabbage

Ingredients

1 large cabbage
cold chicken or any cold meat, finely chopped
seasoning to taste

Directions

Prepare

Remove the core from the cabbage.
Finely chop the cold chicken or meat and season it well.

Stuff and cook

Stuff the cabbage with the meat mixture.
Tie the cabbage securely with string.
Boil the stuffed cabbage for 1.5 to 2 hours.

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.

Cabbage + chickentop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together436 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 edible wrapper that holds the filling and softens as it cooks.
Cold chicken or meat: Provides the savory filling that the cabbage encloses.

“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.